Why we're here. Who we are. Editorial guidelines. Consider the lozenge: Heroin, candy, and Halls. In the 19th century, doctors began adding morphine, heroin and formaldehyde to tablets in an effort to stop coughs. Sadaf Ahsan, Feb 10 Lozenges and cough candies have a long and storied past.
Do each or any of these send a shudder through your nostril or a tingle down your throat? One wonders, then, how these brands became synonymous with the common cold, and when lozenges became an essential medical currency, second perhaps only to aspirin. Resource Centre. Sponsored By. Are you iron deficient? Check your symptoms.
Foods rich in iron — plant and animal sources. Is FeraMAX right for you? Known by a series of aliases, including and not limited to troche, cachou, cough sweet, the rather conspicuous horehound and the adorable cough lolly, your average lozenge performs the simple task of calming and lubricating any irritation in the throat.
They serve as relieving products, not cures. Consider it a bit of luxury for your throat. Like many prevailing medicines, lozenges originated in Ancient Egypt, specifically BC.
Then, they were often made of honey, with flavours ranging from citrus to spice. In the 19th century, however, lozenges took on a far less simple formula when doctors began adding morphine and heroin to the tablets in an effort to stop the cough before it could happen. Of course, soon after, these dangerous ingredients were nixed in fear of inciting opioid addictions in those simply attempting to fight off a common cold. Most lozenge companies, however, had much more charming beginnings, many having started as candy manufacturers.
In hopes of keeping drugstores and other similar brands from imitating their lozenge product, the brothers sold the cough drops in branded boxes, featuring a logo of their bearded faces. The brothers soon became known as the nicknames Trade and Mark, and their logo became a beloved pop culture visual, popping up in comics and newspapers everywhere, helping to propel the company and its lozenges to even greater heights.
Who can we blame for the bathroom scale? Halls, one of the more popular brands in Canada, originated in the U. And Smith Brothers nearly coughed its last. The brand languished over the next few decades, a victim of poor corporate management and increased competition.
In , with the product essentially off the shelves of all major retail outlets, annual revenues were down to less than one million dollars. There were still many references to the brand in pop culture: I saw it in Boardwalk Empire, in an Adam Sandler movie. It still had high brand awareness, even though it had been off the shelf for 20 years. That kind of awareness is the foundation on which he hoped to rebuild the company. But we are not rebuilding based on nostalgia.
The product has to be efficacious. We want to make better cough drops and cold and flu remedies. He expanded and, he says, improved the product line.
He built a new Web site and ordered new packaging. And he slowly reintroduced the product in the Chicago market. Yet he never messed with the signature image: two bearded brothers from Poughkeepsie. Halls are. Ricola is some guy in Switzerland blowing a horn. We are introducing [the Smith Brothers] as living beings.
They were the innovators. They made the first cough drops and built the first cough drop factory. And here we are, something years later. Prior to this, however, there were several well-known mass-manufactured brands of cough drops circulating in America. The company was led by brothers Andrew and William, but the idea originated with their father James, a candymaker in Poughkeepsie, N. As the story goes, in a peddler named Sly Hawkins sold James the recipe for a cough reliever.
James used his confectioneering experience to refine it into a candy-like product. William and Andrew helped their father, eventually taking over the business after his death in As a marketing strategy and in order to discourage the sale of imitations, the Smith brothers added images of their faces to brand boxes of their products, the jars or bowls in which cough drops would be sold in drugstores and newspaper advertisements.
William Luden pioneered the creation of menthol cough drops in , inspired by the small bottles of menthol carried around by cold-sufferers in an effort to relieve their symptoms. He proved to be as savvy a marketer as the Smith brothers, most notably by providing samples of his cough drops to railroad workers, who then served as unofficial traveling advertisements across the nation. More recently, Swiss baker and confectioner Emil Richterich founded the company that would become known as Ricola in Ten years later, it produced its first original cough drop, with its recognizable blend of herbs.
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