Heath bar

Heath

Top: A Heath bar Bottom: A split Heath bar
Product type	Toffee candy bar
Owner	The Hershey Company
Country	U.S.
Introduced	1914
Related brands	Skor
Markets	U.S.
Previous owners	L.S. Heath Leaf, Inc.

The Heath bar is a candy bar made of toffee and milk chocolate, marketed by L.S. Heath beginning in 1914, subsequently by Leaf, Inc., and since 1996 by Hershey.

Shaped as a thin hard slab with a milk chocolate coating, the toffee originally contained sugar, butter, and almonds, and was a small squarish bar weighing 1 ounce. It is similar to Hershey's Skor bar and Mondelēz's Daim bar. The Heath bar ranked 56th nationally in the US and 110th on the US East Coast in a 1987 popularity survey, and has become a popular add-in ingredient to ice cream, cookies and other confections.

In 1913, L.S. Heath, a school teacher, bought an existing confectionery shop in Robinson, Illinois as a likely business opportunity for his oldest sons, Bayard Heath and Everett Heath. The brothers opened a combination candy store, ice cream parlor, and manufacturing operation there in 1914.

With the success of the business, the elder Heath became interested in ice cream, and opened a small dairy factory in 1915. His sons worked on expanding their confectionery business. At some point they reportedly acquired a toffee recipe, via a traveling salesman, from a Greek confectioner in another part of the state. In 1928, they began marketing it locally as "Heath English Toffee", proclaiming it "America's Finest".

In 1931, when Bayard and Everett were persuaded by their father to sell the confectionery and work at his dairy, they brought their candy-making equipment with them, and established a retail business there. The Heaths came up with the marketing idea of including their toffee on the order form taken around by the Heath dairy trucks, so that one could order Heath bars to be delivered along with one's milk and cottage cheese.