by Steve Almond
FEEDING THE BEAST
That was my first taste of industrial candy production. I was delirious. I called Walter Marshall and explained, as calmly as I could, that I would need to tour the Haviland factory as well. Marshall acceded, without much enthusiasm.
I arrived at the factory only to find a huge tanker truck parked out front, the kind commonly used to transport gas or heating oil. In this case, it was transporting corn syrup. The syrup was pumped into the building through an industrialsized fire hose, which was screwed into a valve in the side of the building—the corn syrup valve. It was labeled. This pleased me inordinately, as did the lobby and the stairwells and the elevator, all of which smelled like chocolate. (Is it humanly possible to dislike a facility in which the elevators smell like chocolate?)
The factory itself was on its last legs. The machines were aging. The production floors were cramped and awkwardly laid out. Plastic tarps had been hastily affixed to certain areas of the ceiling, to contain leaks. The fellow assigned to show me around, a young engineer named Eric Saborin, was unfazed by these problems. Short of something landing on his actual head, he was not going to sweat a little clutter.
The majority of the Haviland factory was composed of assembly lines, virtually all of which were dedicated to coating something in chocolate: caramel squares, raspberry jellies, coconut creams. On one floor, a machine plinked out soft kisses of chocolate, then sprinkled them with tiny white beads of sugar, to create nonpareils. Nearby, I watched row after row of peppermint disks enrobed in dark chocolate—the vaunted Haviland Thin Mints (HTM).
A few words about this ferociously underrated product: The standard HTM has a chocolate-to-mint ratio of greater than 50 percent. If, like me, you buy seconds, you can often find mutant batches in which the chocolate layers have come out even thicker. A fresh HTM has an almost liquid center and a mint flavor that is mild enough to complement the chocolate, rather than overwhelming it. Even at retail prices, one can buy a five-ounce box for a buck. In short, the HTM makes the York Peppermint Pattie its bitch.
Saborin was busy explaining to me “the volatile nature of the chocolate medium.” You couldn’t just melt chocolate down and start pouring. Oh no. It had to be prepped in special kettles, heated, cooled, then heated again, a process called tempering. A piece of chocolate that had been properly tempered had a beautiful sheen, almost like glass. “It should snap,” Saborin explained. He picked up an HTM and snapped it in two. Then, without a word of warning, he threw both halves into a trash bin.
This happened so quickly I didn’t know quite what to do. I stood there in a little cloud of disillusionment. Saborin had somehow become inured to the holiness of his work product and this struck me as a very distressing situation indeed, given that I’m someone who has been known to eat the pieces of candy found underneath my couch.
Haviland’s most intriguing area was the panning room, which consisted of two rows of squat copper urns, known as … pans. The panning technique originated in Italy, well before the rise of industrial machines. Basically, you threw a bunch of peanuts, or raisins, inside the pan, poured in a liquid sugar coating, and started spinning. The constant circular motion ensured that each piece was evenly coated.
Modern panning technology is a bit more sophisticated. At Haviland, the panning staff—covered head-to-toe in white, like the workers at a nuclear reactor—used special nozzles to spray chocolate onto the rotating morsels. They were also able to adjust cold-air vents to keep pieces from sticking together. On the day I visited, the panners were in full Easter frenzy. More than a dozen nozzles were going and the air in the panning room was permeated with chocolate vapor. I was breathing chocolate air.
Saborin took me into the adjoining storage room to show me the finished product: malted milk eggs. Trays of them were stacked, one atop the next, to keep the lovely speckled shells from fading in the light. Saborin reached into a bin, pulled out a purple egg, and bit it in half, so I could see the multiple layers: the malted center, the chocolate coating, the speckled candy shell, and the shellac. I doubt Saborin envisioned, back when he was getting his degree in mechanical engineering, that he would someday explain the technical intricacies of his job by biting into a malted milk egg. But he seemed perfectly happy and asked me if I wanted to go downstairs to see the chocolate bunnies.
These were, in point of fact, marshmallow bunnies covered in chocolate. They rode the conveyor belt three astride, looking nonchalant in profile, as a curtain of milk chocolate washed down onto their white fleshy pelts and enveloped them and seeped off to reveal the dimensions of their bodies in a lustrous brown. Saborin was saying something or other, involving, I think, starch. I was watching the bunnies.
Simply: I could not stop watching the bunnies, the way the light struck the wet chocolate from above, the creamy falling away of the excess into a darkened pool below, the steel machinery flecked and streaked in brown. The workers overseeing the production line didn’t seem to know what to do. I myself didn’t know what to do. I was obviously experiencing some kind of dramatic psychic event, one that bordered on the disassociative. I had fallen into what I would later come to recognize as a freaktrance, a state of involuntary rapture induced by watching candy production at close range. These trances were the result of several factors.
First, the presence of huge, precisely calibrated machinery just made me hot. This has to do with my own mechanical ineptitude, which is of a degree that I recently spent two and a half hours attempting to replace my windshield wipers. For me, the chance to watch a mechanical process—the flawless execution of a series of intricate actions, the stainless steel ingenuity of it all—was deeply reassuring. It restored my faith in physics, a discipline I have never quite understood, despite having taken an Advanced Placement course senior year in high school. Most humans share this fascination, because we are, by our nature, messy, flawed, inconsistent, conflicted. Mass production is the opposite of all these things.
We are, furthermore, in the midst of what I would call a radical object disconnect. For most of human history, people essentially knew where their stuff came from. The farmer grew your carrots. The tailor stitched your britches. The cobbler made your shoes. But as the world has become industrialized, people have drifted away from the means of production. Technology is out there, somewhere, banging out our products in ever more sophisticated manners, and they show up brightly wrapped in our vast emporiums and we pay for them with plastic cards. Watching the process by which our products are made reconnects us to the wonders of production. Indeed, it provides a soothing sense of technology as our benefactor, in a naïve everyday-in-every-way-we-are-getting-better-and-better kind of way.
The candy factory, in particular, places all the foul props of the modern age in the service of our most innocent desires. To watch huge, metal machines plink out delicate chocolate bunnies—what delicious irony! The bogeyman of technology tamed! Bunnies not bombs! This is a bunch of crapola, of course. Candy companies are servants of late-model capitalism, just as surely as Exxon and Dow. They dehumanize workers, both here and abroad, and pump out pollution and provide an indulgence that is unconscionable, given the great many people on the planet who are starving to death—which is all the more reason to lose oneself in the trance. In the trance, all that matters is the thing before you: the sheen of the chocolate, the tumble of peanuts, the dappled river of caramel, the miraculous union of these parts into a whole.
At a certain point, Saborin realized I’d fallen under the chocolate spell. He came and gently touched my elbow. “You okay?”
I nodded, a little dizzily. “It’s just so lovely.”
“Wait till next year,” he said. “We’re moving to a new factory over in Revere. All new machines. It’ll make this place look like the Stone Age.”
3
A TOP-SECRET CHOCOLATE SITUATION
I was pretty fired up now, as it had become clear to me that actual professionals in the candy industry would grant me access to actual candy f
actories. So I decided to call Tootsie Roll Industries, the Chicago-based company that owns Cambridge Brands, Boston’s other major candy concern. Its factory, the last remaining on Confectioner’s Row, produced Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, and Charleston Chews.
I explained to Ellen Gordon, the president, that I was a huge fan of Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops, that I had done some major bonding with my dad over Junior Mints, that I had frozen approximately 243 Strawberry Charleston Chews over the years and cracked each and every one of them on the kitchen counter of our old house on Wilkie Way, that it was very likely microscopic shards of said product which accounted for the chronic ant problem we experienced during my middle school years, and that given all this I would be more than happy to tour the Cambridge Brands plant at her convenience.
Ms. Gordon laughed politely and explained that no such visit would be possible. For competitive reasons, she said, not impolitely. She assured me that the manufacturing process for the products in question was proprietary and that the company’s equipment was beyond state of the art.
“Beyond state of the art,” I said. “Surely you jest. Junior Mints enrobed with lasers? Genetically engineered Sugar Babies?”
“Sorry,” Gordon said.
As it turns out, the larger candy manufacturers are notoriously secretive operations. I had always assumed that the industrial espionage in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was trumped-up fiction. Not so. Roald Dahl based his book on the legendary exploits of the Cadburys and Rowntrees, who routinely sent moles to spy on one another’s operations.
A young Forrest Mars, the founder of Mars (which now goes by the yummy-sounding name Masterfoods, and which I will continue to refer to as Mars, both out of antiglobalist zeal and basic kindness to the reader), briefly worked in a Swiss chocolate factory, for the express purpose of sussing out trade secrets. His chief competitor, Milton S. Hershey, reportedly toured various Swiss factories during the era when he was trying to learn how to make milk chocolate.
There are three reasons that espionage remains such a big anxiety in the candy industry:
1. You can’t patent a chocolate bar. You can patent a name and a wrapper and a logo. But the recipes and ingredients are fair game; there is nothing to stop a competitor from selling a copycat version of your product. Hershey’s Skor Bar, for instance, was a bald-faced attempt to win the chocolatecovered-butter-toffee market from the Heath bar. (Hershey’s eventually wound up purchasing Heath, thus ensuring a total monopoly.)
2. The staple ingredients of most candies are quite similar, which means that the vital data resides in the manufacturing process.
3. Success, in the candy market, often has less to do with producing the best candy as with getting to market first. When a candy company comes up with a popular innovation—such as the production of a snack-size bar—the competition had better figure out how to match the feat, and quickly.
I spoke to Joël Glenn Brenner about all this, because she was probably better qualified than anyone to discuss the paranoia that pervades the candy industry. Several years ago, she published a terrific book called The Emperors of Chocolate, which detailed the vicious historical competition between Mars and Hershey. As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Brenner spent years attempting to gain access to the Mars plant, a process she described as “pretty miserable. It’s just a terribly closed environment.”
And not just to nosy reporters. As Brenner observed in her book, outside workers called in to repair machinery in areas considered proprietary are blindfolded, allowed to fix the machine in question, then blindfolded and escorted out of the plant. Hershey’s isn’t much better. The company may try to project a fuzzy, all-American image, but we’re talking about an operation that shreds its marketing plans.
On the other hand, Brenner said, the secrecy is necessary to some extent. There are secrets in the industry worth millions, and the only way to get them is to get inside the plant, or to pay someone to get inside. “Look at the Wonderball fiasco,” Brenner said. The Wonderball is a Nestlé product, basically a milk chocolate ball with hard candies inside. There were a couple of companies that wanted to introduce the same kind of product in America, and the result was a frenzy of spying, or alleged spying, amongst the larger candy companies. This happened all of three years ago. The competition to get to market is that fierce. In a tone of undisguised relief, Brenner told me that she no longer covered the candy industry. But the trend in candy was the same as elsewhere, she assured me, “The big guys gobble up the little guys or drive them out of business.” This has resulted in an industry that operates on two distinct planes:
1. The Big Three (Nestlé, Hershey’s, Mars); and
2. All the other little freaks.
Nestlé was launched 125 years ago by the milk chocolate pioneer Henri Nestlé. In recent years, the Swiss company has become a multinational behemoth, snapping up the British chocolate giant Rowntree, the Italian Perugina, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Oh Henry! and a dozen other brands.
Most Americans had never even heard of chocolate in 1893, when Milton S. Hershey attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (The question that leaps to mind here, rather stubbornly, is why on earth they would want to go on living, but I will leave that aside for now.) Hershey himself made caramels, but the moment he saw and smelled the exhibit devoted to producing chocolate bars he knew he was witnessing the freak of the future and snapped up the entire operation. He spent a decade figuring out how to mass-produce milk chocolate bars and, just as important, sold them in previously unheardof venues—groceries, pharmacies, diners. The empire has expanded to include Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milk Duds, Almond Joy, Heath, Whatchamacallit, and some dozen other bars. (Fun fact: The S stands for Snavely.)
Forrest Mars went through his share of failures as a confectioner—among his numerous flops was a pineappleflavored Mars bar—but by the forties he had established himself as Hershey’s chief competitor. Shrewd, abstemious, and famously publicity shy, Mars was the first man to recognize the global reach of the candy bar market. Among the company’s gazillion products are Milky Way, M&M’s, and the most popular candy bar in America, Snickers.
THE POLITICS OF THE RACK
All this is worth noting, in a Wall Street Journalish sort of way. But it was the second group, the little guys, that intrigued me. In my own pathologically romantic sense of things, I viewed these companies as throwbacks to the bygone era of candy, when each town had its own individual brands. And the good peoples of this country would gather together in public squares with lots of trees and perhaps a fellow picking a banjo, and they would partake of the particular candy bar produced in their town and feel a surge of sucrose-fueled civic identity. What I really wanted to do was to visit these companies—if any still existed—and to chronicle their struggles for survival in this wicked age of homogeneity, and, not incidentally, to load up on free candy.
But I needed a source still in the business. I turned to Lisbeth Echeandia, the former publisher of Confectioner Magazine. Echeandia, now a candy consultant, lives in Texas and is married to a Spaniard but is, in fact, confusingly, Australian. She thought my idea was just lovely, maybe even historically vital, given that so many smaller candy companies were going belly-up. The industry would eventually consist of 150 companies, she predicted, down from the 6,000 concerns that thrived during the boom years between the World Wars. This was not a particularly controversial forecast in the candy world. Echeandia was also a champion of the small, independent candy companies. “It’s so tough for them to survive,” she said, “with these slotting fees.”
“What’s a slotting fee?” I said.
“If you want your product on the racks,” she explained, “you have to pay a slotting fee. And they can be very expensive.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “You mean companies have to pay to get their stuff into stores?”
Yup.
Echeandia explained that the larger retail chains charge tens of thousands of dollars to place a
particular candy bar in the racks near the register. Very few people, after all, head into the supermarket with Twix on their shopping list. Instead, they get stuck in the checkout line and the candy rack starts to call out to them, sirenlike, and they take a look at the wrappers and get a freakbuzz, accompanied, invariably, by the Guilt Hammer, which strikes them just behind the left ear. And if you watch people carefully around these racks—as I do—you can see this terrible internal struggle played out: the sideways glance at the wrappers, the contrite straightening up, the useless effort to lose oneself in the gossip rags (BEN EATS J-LO’S ASS IN BLOODY CANNIBAL FEAST!) followed by a second, lingering inspection, during which the consumer is, in fact, fantasizing about the various candy bars, imagining them naked, conjuring up that first, illicit bite, followed sometimes by a soft fingering of the wrapper, and, in most cases, a furious snatch of the desired bar, to be buried beneath the healthiest item in the basket. Oh woe to us so staggered by our self-love!
If there’s a child involved, this conflict is neatly externalized. He or she plays the role of tyrannical id, while the adult, usually a mother already worn down by the rigors of guiding a tyrannical id through fourteen aisles, offers token resistance. (Note that the average height of most candy racks corresponds directly to the height of a child.) During a visit to my local market, I heard the following exchange between a girl of about eight and her father.
GIRL: Does everyone die?
DAD: You’re not going to die for a long time, honey.
GIRL: But everyone does die, right?
DAD: Not for a long, long time.
GIRL: Maddy told me everyone dies.
DAD: Maddy (inaudible).
GIRL: Aren’t you afraid to die, Dad?
DAD: You know what, sweetie? You shouldn’t worry about things like that. You know what you should worry about? Just being alive and being happy.
GIRL: (pause) Dad, can we get Hershey’s Kisses?
Obviously, those companies without the financial resources to afford slotting fees are at a huge disadvantage. They can’t get stocked at the major chain supermarkets or convenience stores or pharmacies. They have to make do at the smaller, independent outlets—which are themselves being driven out of business—or at discount stores.