Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  This is just business. Retailers want things as simple and profitable as possible. If stores can deal with a half-dozen companies and fill their racks and get paid, why should they bother with a smaller candy company that makes only one product? The problem with this logic, Echeandia observed, is that candy isn’t like other products. There’s no great advantage to stocking, say, a huge variety of laundry soaps, because consumers view this product as an impersonal necessity. But with candy, the buy impulse is intimate and discretionary, most often triggered by the very sight of a particular piece. More variety means more triggers. And the longer you keep a consumer in front of the racks, the more triggers you hit. I myself have always been unreasonably drawn to candy suppliers with an abundant rack (such as the Old Barrel) for this very reason.

  But the racks are just a means to an end, which is to achieve hegemony over the average American mouth. Tastes are not inborn, after all. They are developed. The reason Americans favor milk chocolate over dark is because Milton Hershey got his bars into enough American mouths to establish our collective taste. His interest was not in establishing variety, but just the opposite. He wanted everyone eating the same bar—his.

  Given this paradigm, it became clear why the candy giants were so eager to establish beachheads in China, the former Soviet Union, and the developing world. Advertising and marketing campaigns can go a long way toward selling tennis shoes. But with candy bars, it’s all about the intimate experience of the product in a person’s mouth, because eventually the tastes and textures of that experience—the creaminess of the chocolate, the crunch of the peanuts, the elasticity of the caramel—take up residence in the sense memory. This is why most people can conjure up, so precisely, the experience of eating their favorite candy bar. In the common parlance this is called a craving.

  The Big Three were locked in an economic battle with billions of dollars at stake, Echeandia explained. So naturally, they’d tried to become all things to all people. They never used to make seasonal pieces. That niche was left to smaller companies. Now they all made special pieces for the holidays. When you ate a Milky Way in Christmas foil, you were actually reinforcing the desire for that brand. They also had attempted to provide variety by continually introducing new bars. Most of these were actually brand extensions, the confectionary equivalent to Hollywood sequels: Reese’s Peanut Butter Sticks, M&M’s Crispy, and so on. To cite a particularly blatant recent example: Mars recently phased out its namesake bar and replaced it with the Snickers Almond, a nearly identical bar, in the hopes of cashing in on its hottest brand name.

  Consolidation had not been limited to the merchandising side. Many of the larger distributors would no longer carry candy that didn’t sell to the major chains. This was crucial for smaller companies, which often couldn’t afford their own fleet of refrigerated trucks and storage spaces, meaning they couldn’t ship their products when the weather got too warm. The Big Three, by contrast, had built their own distribution systems. As Brenner detailed in her book, Mars had established dominance in the Arab world by building refrigerated distribution centers and in-store displays.

  The Big Three were also at a huge advantage when it came to securing raw materials. Both Hershey’s and Mars, for instance, owned cocoa plantations. They made their own chocolate, selling the surplus to smaller companies. They had enough buying power to minimize the fluctuations of the commodities market. Thanks to the political muscle of domestic sugar producers, for instance, American sugar prices were being kept artificially inflated. It had become cheaper to produce certain candies in Canada or Mexico and ship them back to the United States for sale.

  Given the economic landscape, I wondered if any company, other than the Big Three, could ever introduce a new candy bar to the mainstream market?

  Echeandia laughed. “There are easier ways to commit suicide,” she said. “And it’s a great pity, too, because people have an emotional relationship to candy. They get very shaken up if their favorite brand disappears.” Echeandia herself used to travel to Canada to find childhood favorites such as the Crunchy Bar and the Violet Crumble.

  THE LAST MAN IN AMERICA WITH BLACK JACK GUM

  For further evidence, one needed look no further than the Internet, the last refuge of the obsessive, where a crop of companies had popped up to serve the emerging nostalgia candy market. The first and most prominent of these, CandyDirect.com, peddled a variety of sweets that had become hard to find retail. It was really a freak depot. This was most apparent on the site’s message board, which was flooded with notes from folks desperately seeking some candy from their youth. I found myself deeply touched by these outbursts, which reassured me I was not alone in my freakdom. A few outtakes:

  For the last 23 years or so I have had Malted Milk Eggs from Brach’s. I need my Eggs. Where are they? I have looked in every drug store, every food store, and the local farmers market I can not find them anywhere. Please help with my withdralls [sic]. I think all the time about the egg in my mouth sucking the candy shell off then letting the chocolate melt in my mouth, then when it gets to the malted part you just let it dosolve [uh, sic] in your mouth.

  Well, I guess this is my last attempt!! I’ve tried to get any info regarding a gumball called “Zappers” No help from anyone. Last try!! Please help with even sharing just a memory.

  HELP ME, PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I NEED TO FIND ORANGE BUBBLE YUM BUBBLE GUM. NOT SHERBERT. ORANGE. I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR 2 YEARS. THIS IS MY BOYFRIENDS FAVORITE. IF I FIND IT HE MAY ASK ME TO MARRY HIM. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFO, PLEASE PLEASE CONTACT ME!!!!!

  CandyDirect.com was the brainchild of a fellow named Steve Traino, a 34-year-old native of Rochester, New York, and the most authentically American human being to whom I have ever spoken. I mean this as a compliment. He had wanted to be an entrepreneur his entire life. At age eight, he sold handdrawn mazes to his classmates for a dime. Later, he ran a garage sale business, buying and reselling his neighbors’ junk and splitting the profit with them. After graduating from college with a degree in business, he opened a frozen yogurt shop, which soon went under. He returned home to live with his parents and eventually drifted to San Diego, where he worked for Xerox and, later, for a couple of high-tech companies. He continued to harbor the dream of every conscientious American: to launch a business and become filthy rich.

  Traino’s decision to start CandyDirect.com was based on his stint as a Pop Rocks black marketeer back in the seventies. He, too, bought boxes of the candy in California and resold them at school. He even snagged the Poprocks.com domain name in 1996, though he never used it, fearing he’d get sued for copyright infringement. Instead, he broadened his scope to include all manner of rare candies.

  “The hits were kind of slow at first,” Traino recalled. “Luckily, I had a shower in the office.”

  “Wait a second,” I said, “you had a shower in your office?”

  “Actually, the shower was down the hall.”

  “So you lived in your office?”

  “I tried to be kind of subtle about it, because I didn’t want the landlords to find out. But they must have known. I mean, here I am, walking down the hall with my hair all wet.” Traino chuckled softly. “I had a front part where the business was and a little room in back where I had my futon and a TV. I had satellite TV. It was right in Mission Valley, which is a really nice part of town. I used to go up on the roof and walk around at night. It was very peaceful. Then, as the business expanded, I graduated to an apartment, which doubled as an office, and then I graduated to an office and an apartment.”

  Traino, who had a friendly, somewhat scattered phone manner, told me a story about a young woman who came out from Michigan in search of an obscure fruit candy called Deltha Rolls. She sounded “you know, young and cute” on the phone, so Traino talked up the business and invited her to drop by the office. “I’m sure she thought it was going to be some huge warehouse. But it was just me, a guy living in his office.”

  Modesty notwithstanding, Traino was one
of the first people to foresee the tremendous potential of the nostalgia candy market. Long before Ralph Lauren’s daughter Dylan opened her candy boutique in Manhattan, Traino was peddling Deltha Rolls on-line. Today, he does about a million per year in sales and has four employees and a large air-conditioned facility for storage. One thing hasn’t changed: his customers still tend to freak out when discussing their childhood candy passions. Occasionally, they weep. And they react with vehemence when manufacturers alter a recipe. A few months earlier, a Canadian company had bought out Fleer and made a slight change in the production of Double Bubble. Traino was bombarded with calls from customers desperate for the original formula.

  Several years ago, he got a tip from some friends in the industry that Black Jack, a popular old-school licorice gum, was going to be discontinued. He spent half his savings buying up the available stock. “I had it all in my kitchen cupboards, because I was running the business out of my apartment at that point and I was sitting there looking at all this gum and I was scared to death. But I sold tons of that stuff, because I was the last person in the country to have Black Jack. It was the best investment I ever made.”

  This was a common situation for Traino. He had become, in this sense, a candy speculator, a last resort for the unrequited freak. He no longer even needed industry informants. He was able to figure out when a brand was going to be discontinued by the flood of calls from consumers unable to find it in stores.

  At the same time, he was loathe to regard himself as a liquidator. He actually hated it when companies decided to drop a brand. He was furious when one of Nestlé’s subsidiaries stopped making Wacky Wafers. “I talked to one of their product managers and he told me something about Wacky Wafers being too similar to Bottle Caps and how one line is cannibalizing the other line, something like that. This guy didn’t even understand the difference between the products. Wacky Wafers are fruit-flavored. They’re about the size of quarters. Bottle Caps are much smaller and they’re flavored like sodas, which, I’m sorry, are not fruits. But you know what happens with these companies? They get a bunch of MBAs in there who’ve been working with computers and they don’t care about candy. They’re just in it to make a buck.”

  Traino had reached an interesting juncture in his moral logic. Because, after all, he too was in candy to make a buck. And yet, it was obvious he felt a true dedication to candy, that his product had become more than product to him. Traino had a hard time remaining indignant, though. He was too much of an optimist.

  “What these companies should do,” he decided, “Hershey’s or one of the other big ones, they should buy up some of these smaller companies and start, like, a nostalgia line of candies. They could bring back the candies from the fifties and sixties and seventies. People love that stuff. What would be really cool is for candy to go the way that beer has, with all those microbrews that came in. Local candy bars could make a resurgence! That’s one of my big plans, to get into manufacturing. But you’d have to start small, with gift shops and word of mouth and the Internet.”

  Suddenly, Traino began to laugh. I began to laugh, as well. It was a wonderful thing to make your fortune selling candy. Wasn’t America a wonderful country? I felt one of those rare bursts of faith, a sense of the world as a domain of wondrous good.

  Almost immediately, a horrible thought occurred to me: Traino had probably voted for George W. Bush. He probably believed that America’s role in the world economy was one of heroism, that the rest of the world—with its despots and starving masses and pathological martyrs—could be either rescued or rubbed out by good old American pluck, along with the proper inculcation of prevailing market theory. I thought about the news stories coming out of the Ivory Coast, where nearly half of the world’s cocoa beans are grown, and where children are sold by their parents as slaves and sent into the cocoa plantations to work twelve hours a day, under conditions that the Western world would consider inhuman. Traino was still talking in eager, digressive gusts. He had big dreams and he wanted to send me a bag of Caramel M&M’s and he wanted to know about the new Kit Kat Darks, which I’d mentioned to him earlier. But I was lost to him now, trapped in my own gloomy speculations.

  I began to consider the history of candy, the ways in which imperialism could be traced straight back to the gullet. The lust for sugar and spices was, after all, what drove the early explorers. And cocoa was, without a doubt, the most tragic import. Montezuma considered the beans a gift from the gods. He gave this gift to Cortés and Cortés brought it back to King Carlos of Spain and, within a few decades, half the courts of Europe were hooked. The Catholic Church regarded cocoa as so sacred that it was exempted from the prohibition of fasts. In more lascivious quarters, it was believed to boost sexual prowess (which only goes to show that chocolate has long been a legal sublimation of the erotic, something Cortés might have picked up from Montezuma, who throated a goblet nightly to brace himself for the sweet rigors of his harem). The demand for cocoa amongst the aristocracy was insatiable. And, because the fancy of the idle rich has always been the great unsung engine of progress, ships were quickly dispatched to the damp, humid regions of the globe to establish plantations and trade routes. In this way, the people of the Old World established dominion over the people of the New.

  Fittingly, it was an American—the plucky Dutch immigrant Hershey—who produced bars for the masses. This had the effect of making chocolate seem egalitarian and carefree. But it was no surprise that the candy bar was popularized by the American soldiers of World War I, doughboys who traversed a conquered Europe with a rifle in one hand and a Hershey bar in the other. They were the conquistadors of our age, the advance force of late-model capitalism. Traino could dream all he wanted. (And I could cling to his optimism!) But the plantations were still out there, in the Ivory Coast, in Costa Rica, manned by starving children. Candy bars remained, in the end, the ultimate American palliative, a luxury paid for in blood but cheap enough to seem democratic.

  I had friends, of course, who urged me to eat only selected chocolates, organically grown, on sustainable farms, by workers paid a decent wage. This was a totally reasonable compromise, and I meant to do so. But then the urge for pleasure would rise up and before I could stop myself I’d be licking the smooth underside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Never mind all the obedient liberal guilt. I was an addict, a confirmed freak, a willing accomplice of the modern imperial system, sweettongued and complicit.

  4

  THE CAPO DI TUTTI FREAK

  Talking to Steve Traino was a curious experience. On the one hand, I found it comforting to know that someone out there was a bigger candyfreak than me. And, on the other, I felt that twinge of jealousy familiar to anyone who has spent several years privately gloating because they own the British import, only to discover there are people out there with the original demos—on four-track. I was, at best, a semipro. This became quite clear to me when I met Ray Broekel.

  Broekel is a legend among the confectioniscienti, for the simple reason that he knows more about candy bars than anyone else on earth. He is the author of two books, The Great American Candy Bar Book (1982) and The Chocolate Chronicles (1985), both of which I would characterize, loosely, as illustrated history books. Virtually every person I’d spoken to about candy was aware of Broekel. A number of them were under the impression that he was deceased. He is not deceased, though he is, at 80, somewhat past his prime in terms of Olympic competition. Wonderfully enough, he lives in Ipswich, just an hour north of Boston. I called Broekel and told him I was a great fan of his work and that I wanted to visit him.

  He paused for a long moment, breathing into the phone.

  “Well, alright,” he said.

  Broekel’s house is on a quiet street a few miles outside of town, just where the suburban streets give way to rural routes. He met me at the door, wearing a sweatshirt with Looney Tunes cartoon characters and a Chicago Cubs cap and large squarish glasses of the sort I associated with junior high school science teachers,
which is what Broekel was before he became a full-time writer.

  As on the phone, I began gushing about his work.

  Broekel stood in the doorway, his eyebrows tipped skeptically, waiting for me to peter out. “Stuff’s downstairs,” he said and shuffled down to a sunken basement–type thing that I recognized immediately as the TV room of my childhood home: the same dispirited light and wood paneling and battered lampshades.

  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say the room was what I fantasized our TV room might have looked like, had I been allowed to decorate. The shelves were jammed with candy boxes. I recognized a few (Mounds, Reggie!). But most were brands that predated me (Winkers, Toppers, I Scream, Pie Face, So Big, Cocoanut Cakes) with giddy fonts which had faded over the years.

  One in particular that leapt out at me was Bit-O-Choc, because I’d just been explaining to my friend Ann that Bit-O-Honey did, in fact, produce a chocolate taffy bar for a few glorious years back in the seventies, a topic that enthralled me to no end. (Her response: “This topic is bit O boring.”)

  We stood there for a few minutes admiring the boxes.

  “That’s a lot of boxes,” I said.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  He led me down the hall to an even smaller room, which was piled high with megapacks of toilet paper and SOS pads and animal crackers. Broekel had more boxes here, lined up on a high shelf. Again, I recognized very few of the names—Snirkles, French Pastry, Old Nick, Best Pals, Honest Square, Forever Yours. (As a matter of fact, Forever Yours was the dark chocolate version of the Milky Way, which had been introduced in the thirties then abandoned. It has since been reintroduced, as the Milky Way Midnight.) On the table below this display, next to a paper cutter, Broekel had a stack of old advertisements mounted on poster board.