A Nearly 100-Year-Old Chicago Candy Company Files For Bankruptcy After Staggering Debt

For nearly a century, Primrose Candy Company has produced a wide variety of sweets in Chicago, Illinois. Unfortunately, the company is currently facing financial uncertainty after the loss of two of its major contracts, as well as recently establishing a settlement fund in response to a biometric privacy lawsuit. These contracts amounted to approximately $1 million in annual revenue, and the settlement fund sapped an additional $125,000. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 27, 2026, intending to restructure its debt without losing its Midwest foothold in candy production.

While you may not have heard of Primrose Candy before, odds are high that you have sampled the candies coming out of its 130,000 square foot factory. Those little butterscotch buttons that come wrapped in translucent yellow plastic? Primrose makes them. It's the same for the strawberry hard candies with the liquid center and the wrapping that looks like a strawberry studded with shiny gold seeds, or those intriguing cut rock candies with the tiny pictures in the center. Primrose is a non-chocolate candy producer with a long history that has unfortunately found it harder to keep up with markets in recent times, despite its varieties of both well-known and long-forgotten vintage candies.

In recent years, Primrose has expanded its production line, stepping away from its hard candy specialty by adding products like caramels, popcorn, salt water taffy, and other chewy sweets to its repertoire. Unfortunately, it hasn't been enough to keep the company in line with the rising costs of production. Primrose states that it simply cannot keep its pricing up to both balance out cost increases and allow it to service its old debts.

The debt in question is quite significant. According to the Chapter 11 filing, Primrose carries around $12 million of debt, a whopping $7.5 million of which is owed to Labor Solutions LLC, the supplier of its primarily contract employees. Considering that in 2025 Primrose posted revenues of just $7.8 million, that is a challenging figure to face down. When you include the fact that those 2025 revenues were a $4 million decrease from the previous year, the situation becomes more dire.

In September 2025, Labor Solutions filed a breach of contract lawsuit with Primrose, but that has not prevented the LLC from continuing to supply the roughly 90-person workforce to man the candy factory. Fortunately for Primrose, Labor Solutions is reportedly supportive of the company's reorganization plan as an attempt to keep those hard candies rolling out the door. If Primrose can use this bankruptcy to stabilize its business, it may be ready to celebrate its centennial by 2028.