How the Chocolate Bunny Became the Mouthwatering Mascot of Easter Sweets

In the 19th century, chocolatiers crafted these tasty treats with “complexity and artistry,” says a food curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Kellie B. Gormly | Contributing Writer

April 3, 2026

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Every April, people fill colorful Easter baskets with candy and decorated hard-boiled eggs on a fluffy bed of plastic green grass. Often among the sweets is the iconic chocolate bunny, a tasty nod to the Easter Bunny legend. The character comes from Germany, where the anthropomorphic animal was known as “Osterhase,” or “Easter Hare,” a rabbit that left eggs for well-behaved children on Easter morning.

The largely mass-produced chocolate bunnies of the modern Easter candy market evolved from a 19th century artistic process that involved intricate metal molds to make the bunnies and other chocolates look detailed and realistic.

Chocolate makers in Europe started using molds around the mid-1800s, and German immigrants brought their folklore and chocolate goodies to America. A Pennsylvania confection worker named Robert L. Strohecker is widely credited with popularizing chocolate bunnies in America, due to a flashy display he put up in the window of a department store in 1890. Strohecker created a five-foot-tall chocolate bunny as a marketing gimmick to advertise the small chocolate bunnies that the company sold.

By the late 19th century, confectioners were producing special sweets for holidays using handmade molds, says Paula Johnson, curator of food history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. American manufacturers began making their own chocolate molds around the 1880s. An Easter rabbit chocolate mold in the museum’s collection shows wavy strands of fur on the animal and detailed weave patterns on the basket. Two Easter egg chocolate mold artifacts in the collection show ornate designs featuring bunnies. While their exact dates are unknown, these molds come from the era of the 1880s through the first decade of the 1900s.

The older molds produced fancier, more ornate treats than much of what we see on the market today, Johnson notes.

“I find them fascinating because they represent this care with both confections and baked goods at a different period of time,” Johnson says. “We can appreciate the complexity and artistry of these products.”

Confectioners built off Strohecker’s marketing, which helped establish the Easter Bunny as an icon in America. Their whimsical displays of Easter chocolate in fun shapes—often arranged around a centerpiece, typically a big bunny—raised the profile of the holiday candy in the U.S., especially from the 1910s through the 1930s, according to candy historian Beth Kimmerle. Chocolate and other sweets in the form of bunnies, eggs and chicks became Easter staples, and retail promotion incorporated storytelling and colorful visual delight. This became central to how candy was sold, Kimmerle adds.

“Department stores and confectionery shops created elaborate displays to encourage shopping,” says Kimmerle, author of Chocolate: The Sweet History. “It really was the viral merchandising that fueled this. That’s much like what these Easter and chocolate molds were. They weren’t just cute. They were these objects that helped weave the story of Easter together for all ages.”

Kimmerle has a collection of old-fashioned molds like the ones in the Smithsonian collection. While some people acquire antique molds to display as art, Kimmerle sometimes makes chocolate with her molds, which include bunnies, eggs, fish and a pigeon.

“They yield incredible results,” says Kimmerle. “I cannot say no to chocolate molds. They are beautiful.”

Making and using these 19th and early 20th century molds required skill, Kimmerle says. Working with chocolate can be a challenge. The cocoa butter must form stable crystals to set properly for a glossy appearance. Small temperature fluctuations during cooling or storage can lead to the chocolate cracking.

Chocolatiers of that era faced challenges that modern candymakers don’t have. With highly meltable chocolate and no air conditioning, many companies shut down during the hot summer months, she says.

“The artistry went into the mold, but it still required a lot of hand work on the part of the chocolatier,” Kimmerle says. Metal molds “were so prized by chocolatiers; they really enabled beauty.”

Chocolate bunnies evolved significantly during the 20th century, in both style and the amount of chocolate used. Hollow chocolate bunnies, sometimes loathed by people with a sweet tooth, resulted from the World War II era, when both sugar and metal were at a premium. A lot of metal went into scrap piles to be recycled into war materials, and chocolate became used for military rations.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Smithsonian Magazine (@smithsonianmagazine)

After the war, making hollow, easier-to-eat chocolate bunnies became widespread. Chocolate-making largely shifted to mass production at factories without high-design molds, Kimmerle says.

This made chocolate, once a premium item, cheaper and more available to everyone. Today’s professional chocolatiers favor plastic polycarbonate molds, Kimmerle says. Home chocolate makers often use silicone molds for ease. And design tastes changed, too. In Kimmerle’s view, a lot of today’s chocolate bunnies look more like cute animations from a cartoon.

“There are far fewer human hands in modern factories; everything is robotic,” she says. That’s what makes the old molds so special: “They survived from a time that mold-making was so hard, but molding chocolate was a craft.”

Kellie B. Gormly | Read More

Kellie B. Gormly is an award-winning veteran journalist who freelances for national publications, including the Washington Post, History.com, Woman's World and First for Women. She is a former staff writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.