by Steve Almond
By the thirties, demand had outstripped supply and Goldenberg relocated to a five-story plant. The company made everything back then: caramels, chews, lollipops. They had one whole floor devoted to fudge. Carl used to work in the fudge department during summers, mixing nuts in with a wooden paddle. The work added 50 yards to his tee shot. His favorite piece was a penny candy called Whip Its, a marshmallow rolled in toasted coconut. Goldenberg’s most popular item, aside from Peanut Chews, was a hard caramel lollipop called the Pop-a-Lick. The sucker was popularized by a radio personality named Wee Willie, who hosted a program for kids. Indeed, his endorsement was so fervent that he sparked one of those kid-driven frenzies. For a while, the company couldn’t make enough Pop-a-Licks to keep pace.
Goldenberg did brisk business during World War II because the company had quotas that allowed them to buy sugar and peanuts. It was strictly a seller’s market then. But when the war ended everything changed. Suddenly, people could make fudge in their own kitchens. The candy market quickly glutted. Faced with slumping sales, David Goldenberg decided to liquidate the business in 1949.
That was fine with all the various relatives—except his youngest son, Harry, who wanted something to pass on to his sons. He made a crucial decision: to relaunch the company with just one product. While the old factory was shutting down, Harry designed a new plant. “I remember him drawing up those plans on our dining room table,” Carl said. “He never graduated from high school, but he knew electricity. He was something of a genius when it came to machines. He could look at a broken wrapping device and diagnose the problem, like a good doctor can diagnose a physical problem.”
Harry was also an astute businessman. He intuited, correctly, that there was enough demand for Peanut Chews to sustain a smaller, leaner operation. Goldenberg has maintained its core market, from Boston down the coast to Virginia, plus a few new markets, most notably in Florida.
“And then there’s Korea,” Carl said.
“Korea?” I said.
“Yeah, Korea.” Carl shook his head in bemusement. “Our broker over there—this young man sells everybody. He competes with Mars and Hershey’s. He was buying so much that I said to Ed, our guy in sales, ‘What’s going on?’ I pictured a warehouse bulging at the seams. But it sells over there, as long as it’s fresh.”
I took this as a testament to the fact that tastes can be altered, in a market not already saturated with candy bars. But I wondered how, exactly, the company hoped to win new fans in America.
“Well, one thing we did,” Carl explained, “we had one of those, I forget the term, where you gather people to discuss a particular thing …”
“A focus group?”
“Yeah, we did a focus group.”
The focus group revealed that consumers viewed the Peanut Chews wrapper as old-fashioned. So the company updated the wrappers a few years ago. They also introduced a milk chocolate Chew. Aside from these measures, though, Goldenberg can’t do much. They can’t diversify. They can’t advertise. And they can’t pay slotting fees. (Winn-Dixie, the grocery chain, recently demanded $25,000 to stock Peanut Chews. Goldenberg had to demur.)
“Way back when, there were so many family businesses here in Pennsylvania,” Carl said. “We even had an association. Every year, we’d have a convention in Redding. Each family took a different set of cottages. It was really so wonderful, all these aunts and uncles and cousins were there and you knew you were a part of something.”
“What would happen if you tried to hold another one today?”
Carl laughed. “There wouldn’t be anybody. The Blumenthals are gone. The Minters are gone. The Bachmans are gone. If my father hadn’t done what he did, we’d be gone, too.”
We had reached a place of melancholy. Carl gazed at Jena in a way that made the both of us want to rush forward and comfort him. But then he smiled, as if to say Well, enough of that, and he took us to the conference room to see a great variety of wrappers. We were soon joined by his son David, who, in marked contrast to his male forebears, was exceedingly tall and well muscled. He looked, with his thick glasses and sweet goofy smile, like a cross between Jerry Lewis and Lou Ferrigno.
David told us he’d wanted to become a vet when he was younger. “I wasn’t raised to be a Chew,” he said. “That’s a little Chewish humor.”
A brief silence ensued.
“Did your dad pressure you to join the family business?” I asked.
“Not really,” David said. “I never hung out in the factory as a kid. But I used to come into the office to write papers in high school and whenever I smell those peanuts, if I haven’t been in the factory for a while, it sends me right back to my youth. That smell has been with me for a long time.”
“There was great joy when he called to tell me he was interested in the business,” Carl interjected. “I never said anything to him, though. I knew better than that.”
“He wrote me a letter,” David said.
“That’s right,” Carl said. “I wrote him a letter.”
David started with the company in 1977. He took over as plant manager six years later. In 1997, he became president. (I had the guy pegged as 35. He was 47.) The business he took over was much the same as the one his grandfather founded. It was the competition that had changed. The Big Three now controlled the racks. These were global companies with tremendous buying power. They were able to think long-term. The one factor they could not control was the consumer’s desire for variety. “People don’t just want two peanut products,” David said, “Snickers and Baby Ruth.”
The Big Three are well aware of that, though, which is why they keep introducing new peanut-based bars: Fast Break, Snickers Cruncher, and so on. Another potential problem, as David acknowledged, was the shifting demographic. How was Goldenberg supposed to replenish the aging Peanut Chews fan base with younger devotees? For the moment, they were hoping new wrappers and special sale packs would help.
“We’re never going to compete with the big guys,” David said. “But we continue to do a good business. Sometimes I wish my great-grandfather could see what we’ve built here. I’d like to be able to bring him back, give me half an hour, and I could show him around. Then he could go back to wherever he was.”
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked.
“No. But I got to work with my grandfather for twenty years. He was an absolute genius mechanically—”
“I told him,” Carl said.
“Remarkable. He was a remarkable taster, too. He could taste something and tell you if it had vanilla or orange or whatever and I think I inherited that. My daughter got that from me.”
David’s kids, a boy and a girl, would be the fifth generation, if they decided to go into the family business. He had no plans to push them in this direction, though.
“I told him a long time ago, you can’t plan to go into a family business,” Carl said. “Because you just don’t know if it’s going to be around.”
Several months after my visit, the family sold the business to Just Born (best known as producers of Mike and Ike and the loathsome Marshmallow Peeps), ending 113 years of independent operation. Carl tried to be upbeat about the move. The plant would remain in operation, virtually all the workers still had jobs. But there was more than a hint of resignation in his voice. “You can’t be a regional company in this environment anymore,” he noted. “We just couldn’t do it on our own.”
On a brighter note: before we said good-bye, Carl gave us a box of 36 bars. Jena told me she wasn’t such a huge fan of Peanut Chews, but I left most of them with her anyhow, figuring this is what Carl would have wanted. A few weeks later I received the following e-mail: “Peanut Chews gone. Am now addicted. Jena.”
7
SOUTHERN-FRIED FREAK
I do know an unfortunate number of southerners, as a result of attending a university in North Carolina (state motto: Why Can’t You Be More Polite?), and virtually all of them, when I mentioned candy bars, assumed that the Goo Goo Cluster would
be at the top of my list. It was not. Part of the reason for this is that candy bars are not often grist for literary culture and thus have been spared the relentless invocation of other such southernisms as kudzu, moonshine, Co-Cola, and Shiloh.
Nonetheless, Goo Goos are by far the best-known candy bar in the South, and certainly the most ornate. They’re giant turtle-looking critters, with marshmallow and caramel in the center and peanuts scattered on top. The Goo Goo Supreme, which features pecans rather than peanuts, was cited by no less an authority than Ray Broekel as his favorite candy bar in the world and he swore to me that I could find them up North, that he had, in fact, bought one just a couple of weeks earlier “in town.” This led me on a wild-goose chase through the suburban precincts of Ipswich, where I would not recommend you look for a Goo Goo Cluster. Nor would I necessarily recommend that you fly down to Nashville, as I did, in order to track down a Goo Goo.
Then again, Goo Goo production is incredibly cool to watch, and Joanne, the marketing director for Standard Candy Company, is also incredibly cool (once you get to know her) and she will give you lots of free Goo Goos. The parenthetical caveat is the result of a lengthy series of phone calls and e-mails, during which I tried to determine on exactly which days Goo Goos would be in production, while Joanne tried to determine whether or not I was insane.
She was much nicer in person, an attractive, fortyish woman with a blond bob and the indefatigable enthusiasm of a camp counselor. On the day I showed up, a Monday, the Goo Goos were not in production. Joanne felt bad about this. She promised that if I came back the next day, I could watch Goo Goos being made, and, as a token of goodwill, she led me through the factory, which was busily cranking out a diet bar for a well-known weight-loss company. The diet bar consisted of: chocolate, crisped rice, and caramel.
I will leave it to the reader to determine just what sort of “diet” would encourage the consumption of these ingredients, though it bears mentioning that this product is but one in a tsunami of pseudo–candy bars, variously called PowerBars, Granola bars, Energy Bars, Clif Bars, Breakfast Bars, Snack Bars, Wellness Bars, and so on, all of which contain roughly the same sugar and fat as an actual candy bar—with perhaps a dash of protein sawdust thrown in—but only half the guilt, and stand as a monument both to shameless marketing and the American capacity for self-delusion, particularly in matters related to consumption (see also: frozen yogurt, fat-free chips, and low-calorie lard).
All this said, I enjoyed watching the production process, in particular the way the crisped rice rained down on the enrobed caramel bars—a hailstorm rendered in miniature. I was a little confused, though, as to why Standard was producing a diet bar for someone else.
Joanne explained, rather carefully, that Standard’s core business was changing. They were doing a lot of contract manufacturing for other companies. She ticked off the names of four well-known brands, none of which I was allowed to cite by name.
Contract manufacturing is one of the best-kept secrets in the retail business. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you run a well-known upscale bakery chain. You want to expand into candy bars, but you don’t have the means to make candy bars, and to acquire them would mean shelling out a lot of dough. What do you do? You find a company with production lines already set up and farm out the manufacturing grunt work to them.
However, you’ve got a brand name to uphold, consumers who expect that your products are made by your employees, in your factories, with the fine attention to detail that allows you to sell a corn muffin for two bucks and change. So you make sure that the company you contract with doesn’t let it slip that they’re the ones who make your product. The idea, in other words, is to save money and maintain brand prestige. The reason Joanne had such a hard time pinpointing when I should visit the plant, it turns out, is because Goo Goos are only in production ten days per month.
The next day Joanne led me to a conference room where she quickly outlined the history of the business. Standard began as a general line confectioner at the turn of the century, producing hard candies and chocolates. Then, in 1912, something remarkable happened: the owner and the plant manager got together in the kitchen and started playing around with various ingredients. The result was the first multi-ingredient candy bar ever produced. The precise origins of the name are not known, though it is generally thought to echo a baby’s first utterance.
Goo Goos are most commonly recognized among country music fans as a faithful sponsor of the Grand Ole Opry, a radio program I had not had the pleasure of hearing. “It’s pretty cool,” Joanne assured me. “At the end of the show, the stars say, ‘God I love the Goo Goo!’ and then the audience goes, ‘They sure are good!’ or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what they say.”
Joanne herself grew up in Michigan. Her parents moved to Georgia when she was in her twenties, and they got in the habit of bringing her Goo Goos when they visited. Her dad was a great fan, which meant, of course, that he was thrilled when Joanne got hired on at Standard, though he was now diabetic, which seemed a cruel irony.
Our first stop on the factory tour was a machine called the Continuous Cycle Starch Mogul, which was making the Goo Goo centers. It was as scary looking as the name suggests: a huge, clicking, clanking behemoth whose various pulleys, ramps, and chutes were coated in a white patina of cornstarch. The ground below looked as if Tony Montana had just thrown one of his special parties for one.
Joanne led me past the mogul and upstairs to a small, sweltering room where marshmallow and caramel were cooked up in stainless steel kettles. I watched a milky brown river of caramel flow through a hole in the floor, down into a hopper below and I thought: caramel. How perfect is caramel? What would happen if I stuck a finger into this caramel? Or a hand? Just how much trouble would I be in here? I took a step toward the caramel and went into a nervous half-crouch just as Joanne, who had been bantering with one of the cooks, wheeled around.
“Are you okay?” she said. “You look funny.”
The mogul worked like this: a stack of wooden trays was loaded into one side of the machine. Each of these was filled with cornstarch. A set of molds was pressed into the starch. In the case of Goo Goos, the molds were circular and about two inches across. These trays then trundled under the depositors, which squirted caramel and marshmallow into the molds. From there, they went to a cooling room to be cured overnight, allowing the cornstarch to absorb any excess moisture. This last step is the crucial feature of the mogul because it eliminates the stickiness that would otherwise make the production of most jellies and creams impossible. The mogul is used to make virtually all candies that begin as liquids. Switching from Goo Goos to, say, jelly beans is simply a matter of changing the molds.
Joanne and I arrived downstairs just as a stack of trays was being wheeled out from the curing room. These were loaded into the mogul, which flipped them over, sending the Goo Goo centers clattering onto a conveyor belt, while the cornstarch was sent whooshing over to a terrifying tented machine labeled SIFTER DISCHARGE, which shook violently in an effort to make sure the recycled cornstarch did not stick together.
The Goo Goo centers looked like, well, UFO ships circa 1954, if you can imagine such a ship composed of half caramel, half marshmallow, and dappled in cornstarch. They whizzed out from the mogul onto an escalating conveyor belt, which carried them into the adjacent room. Here, they were sent flying, willy-nilly, onto the enrobing line.
“Which goes on top,” I said. “Caramel or marshmallow?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Joanne said.
“It doesn’t matter?”
“Nope. Why would it matter?”
I was sort of at a loss. “Just because, you know, for consistency.”
But the Goo Goo Cluster, as I was about to discover, was not some carefully calibrated candy bar with neat angles and computer-regulated ratios. It was a delightful mess. Even the production line was a mess. The initial enrober was draped in a clear tarp. A large, crinkled-steel vent of t
he sort I associated with the back of a dryer was angled through the tarp to blow the excess chocolate off the centers. The tarp was spattered with reddish-brown chocolate. The whole setup looked a little like open-heart surgery.
We moved down the line. The Goo Goo centers emerged from the enrober looking pretty uniform, ranked and shimmering in coats of wet chocolate. You would have never known that all hell was about to break loose, for we had reached … the nut applicator.
Yes, children, the nut applicator.
The nut applicator was a grooved circular device that sat just above the conveyor belt. A hopper fed roasted peanuts into the grooves of the nut applicator, which rotated slowly, dumping each grooveful of peanuts onto a particular row of Goo Goo centers. Applying the peanuts, I suppose I should say, except that apply is a little neat sounding, given the result. Some of the Goo Goos were enveloped in peanuts, double-stacked even, while others had large bare patches. Adding to the chaos was a huge vent which blasted air onto the Goo Goos from above, sending up squalls of red peanut skins.
“We do the first enrobing so the peanuts have something to stick to,” explained Joanne, who had a commendable habit of nibbling on the roasted peanuts at the edge of the conveyor belt. The Goo Goos passed through a short cooling tunnel and over a little moat, into which the peanuts less successfully applied to the centers tumbled.
CHOCOLATE HAIKU
You will have to trust me when I tell you that I have seen a good number of enrobers at this point in my life. But I have never witnessed anything as sublime as the second enrober on the Goo Goo production line. Why? Because the curtain of chocolate that oozes down is so thick that the individual Goo Goos lose almost all sense of contour. They are drowned in chocolate, reduced to shiny amorphous lumps. And then, just as suddenly, reverse vacuums blow the chocolate off each piece and the force of the blower sends up tiny ripples and the Goo Goos reemerge, as in a time-lapse photograph, each inimitable lump and crag outlined.