Enric Bernat, Chupa Chups and Salvador Dalí

Chupa Chups are sold in more than 150 countries, and their daisy logo was designed by Salvador Dalí. The man who persuaded him was a Catalan sweet maker called Enric Bernat.

A family of sweet makers

Enric Bernat was born on 20 October 1923 into a Catalan family that had been making confectionery for three generations, and he started his working life in his parents' cake shop. In the early 1950s he went to northern Spain to revive an apple jam factory. When he told the investors his idea was to make lollipops, they left.

He went ahead anyway. By 1958 he had full control of the company, and he renamed it Chupa Chups, from the Spanish verb chupar, to suck. He built the production machines and sold a striped sweet on a wooden stick, later changed to plastic. In 1959, to reduce competition in Spain, he bought the Spanish patents for similar products. In 1967 the company opened a factory at Sant Esteve Sesrovires, near Barcelona.

The Dalí logo

In 1969 Bernat asked the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to design a new logo. According to the story that is usually told, the two were having coffee when Bernat raised it, and Dalí sketched the design in under an hour, there at the table. Whatever the truth of the timing, the result was the Chupa Chups name set in a brightly coloured daisy.

Dalí also gave some sharp advice. According to the BBC, he suggested the logo should go on the top of the lolly rather than on the side, so that it could always be seen intact.

The first advertising slogan was "Es redondo y dura mucho", it's round and long lasting.

Around the world

Chupa Chups reached Japan in 1977, and in the 1980s spread to the United States, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom. In 1995 they became the first sweets sent to the Mir space station: see sweets in space. Between 2000 and 2003 Chupa Chups was the main shirt sponsor of Sheffield Wednesday.

A football star helped. In the 1990s the Barcelona manager Johan Cruyff, who had been forced to give up smoking for his health, sucked Chupa Chups on the touchline instead. When he died in 2016, fans left lollipops at his memorial.

Suck, don't smoke

The link with smoking became part of the marketing. In the 1980s, with falling birth rates meaning fewer children, the company tried a Smoke Chupa Chups slogan to win adult customers. Later packs parodied cigarette packets, with the slogan Stop smoking, start sucking, and some copied the black and white European health warnings with the words Sucking does not kill. For the older tradition of sweets made to look like cigarettes, see sweet cigarettes.

A Gaudí house and a sale

Bernat's fortune took him beyond sweets. In the 1980s he tried and failed to take over an insurance company, but along the way he became the owner of Casa Batlló, the Antoni Gaudí building in Barcelona. In 1991 he handed control of Chupa Chups to his children, and in 1994 the company launched Smint mints.

Enric Bernat died at his home in Barcelona on 27 December 2003, aged 80. In 2006 his sons sold Chupa Chups to the Italian and Dutch sweet group Perfetti Van Melle, which still owns it. There are now more than 100 flavours, including sugar free ones.

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