Salt water taffy is called that because of a joking remark after a candy shop on the Atlantic City boardwalk was flooded by the ocean in the 1880s, soaking the taffy in seawater; the catchy name stuck and became the candy’s brand.

What salt water taffy actually is

  • It’s a soft, chewy pulled candy made from sugar, corn syrup, water, butter, cornstarch, flavorings, and color.
  • Modern recipes do not use literal ocean water, though they usually include both salt and water, which helps the name still feel somewhat accurate.

The floodboardwalk legend

  • In the early 1880s in Atlantic City, a boardwalk shop’s taffy stock was soaked when seawater flooded the store during a storm or unusually high tide.
  • When a girl later asked for taffy, the owner jokingly said he only had “salt water taffy”; the phrase amused customers (in some tellings, especially the girl’s mother), and other shops copied it.

History in brief

  • Food historians generally place the origin of salt water taffy in Atlantic City in the early 1880s, where it quickly became a classic boardwalk souvenir.
  • Over time, the name became generic for this style of beach-town taffy, even as recipes standardized and spread beyond New Jersey’s shore.

Myths, facts, and marketing

  • The flood story is treated as a legend—plausible but not definitively documented—yet it endures because it explains both the “salt water” twist and the candy’s seaside identity.
  • Regardless of whether every detail is literally true, the name “salt water taffy” worked as brilliant marketing , turning an ordinary pulled-sugar candy into a nostalgic coastal icon.

TL;DR: It’s called “salt water taffy” thanks to an 1880s Atlantic City joke after a seawater flood, plus savvy marketing—today the name survives even though the candy uses regular water and a bit of salt, not ocean brine.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.