List of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory Characters - Veruca Salt

Veruca Salt is a ridiculously overindulged, selfish girl who is spoiled relentlessly by her wealthy parents. Her father apparently owns the Salt's Peanuts shelling factory, which he used to his advantage when trying to find a Golden Ticket that would grant his daughter access to Willy Wonka's candy factory. Throughout the novel, as a running gag, Veruca frequently would pester her parents to purchase a variety of different objects for her that grabbed her attention, until the little girl's materialism finally got the best of her when she interfered with the trained squirrels used by Willy Wonka to select the best nuts to bake into chocolate bars. Judged as a "bad nut" by the squirrels, Veruca was sent toppling into the garbage chute, her parents later enduring the same fate after having been pushed into the chute by the squirrels while trying to retrieve her.

In the 1970s film adaption of the book, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca is portrayed as being a surly, self-centered spoiled brat who rudely demands different desires to her parents nonstop throughout the course of the film, as she'd done in the book, although the squirrels that had tempted her into meeting her elimination from the competition are replaced by geese that lay special eggs used in Wonka candies. In the middle of the movie she and Violet as a funny running gag argue with each other nonstop about their personalities until Violet is forced to desert the tour to be squeezed back into a normal human. Veruca is also shown to be very sassy and uncultured since when Wonka reveals to everybody his amazing lickable wallpaper and says "The strawberries taste like strawberries...and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries!" Veruca says rudely "Whoever heard of a snozzberry?!" Wonka then grabs her by the face and says with a small glare "We are the music makers...and we are the dreamers of dreams..." Veruca meets her demise in the contest at the end of her musical number in the movie, "I Want it Now", after jumping on top of the scale designed to weigh the geese's eggs and falling into the same garbage chute (due to the scale saying that she's a bad egg) sustaining the word "now". Although both of her parents accompanied Veruca on her trip to Willy Wonka's factory in the original novel, Veruca's father only joins her on her visit, her mother playing a minor role in the film. It is unknown what she has moved on to since.

In the 2005 movie adaption, Veruca is depicted as demanding, rude, and materialistic. Her father still serves as her sole supervisor during her visit to Wonka's factory, and the squirrels are kept intact. Her elimination during the trip remains virtually the same as in the book, with only a few changes made (a portrait of her mother is tossed down the garbage chute rather than her mother actually falling down the chute herself by the Oompa-Loompas), while her father still shares his daughter's fate. Unlike the well liked first film Veruca is shown to have successfully escaped the furnace alive with her father but is covered in garbage. When she leaves the factory she sees the flying elevator with Wonka, Charlie and Grandpa Joe inside and says to her furious father that she wants one. Her father however has learned his lesson and says that all she is getting "Is a bath and that's final!" When Veruca furiously retorts that she wants it anyway her father's reply is a fierce glare which gets her to remain silent.