Candyfreak

by Steve Almond

  I paused for a moment. I could see a bright strip of light leaking from beneath the doors to the main hall. Every few seconds someone emerged from the bustle within and a bouquet of bacon and pizza dough came wafting thickly forth. I was, it dawned on me, quite hungry. I was also, for once in my life, neatly dressed. The girl in the red shirt stood before me, her face cast in the polite rictus of the service industry.

  “Idaho Candy Company,” I said.

  “Well, welcome!” She thrust a promotional gift bag into my hand. “You’ll find all your order forms in here.”

  “Excellent,” I said.

  I walked briskly toward the main hall. As I was about to hit the door, I heard someone call out behind me. “Sir! Sir!”

  I turned.

  My greeter motioned urgently at her lapel. “Don’t forget your name tag!”

  What can I tell you about Food Expo 2002? It was the most potent dose of American culinary culture I had ever experienced. Everywhere I looked a salesperson was begging me to taste something designed to kill me: cheesecake, chicken wings, guacamole, French fries, cheese sticks, pork dumplings, popcorn shrimp, pudding cups, kielbasa, corndogs, chili burgers, deviled eggs, brownies, Popsicles, waffle cones brimming with ice cream and freshly zapped hot fudge.

  The Expo was aimed at restaurants and clubs, the great, greasy grazing yards of the lonely American nomad—which was me. And how tenderly the staffers worked at their enticements! With microwaves and Crock-Pots, they prepared dainty cups of chowder and pizza pockets; they heaped plates with chop suey and twirled shiny morsels of stew on colored toothpicks, their ardent hopeless faces sweating a little under the heat lamps. And all this preparation accompanied by a machine-gun patter of quality ingredients and easy prep and no mess and low stress. These guys, you just bang em out. Put em on a plate with some ranch dressing, tartar, whatever you please. That’s right, flash frozen. It’s an exclusive process. The Swedes came up with it. Locks in the natural flavor enzymes. Now, I’m not going to run down the other guys, but you check the ingredients in their breading, you see what they put in there. I’m just proud to be able to offer this product. Look at that texture. Taste that. How does that taste? Be honest. Is that not the finest fish stick on God’s green earth?

  This was the giant, leering craw of the corporate food industry, which was all about convenience, the quick profits of the prefab patty, the potato skin, the suet-shimmering flimflammery of our ravenous fat merchants. Dave’s operation looked positively organic by comparison.

  I spent half an hour drifting from one booth to the next, listening, nodding, opening my mouth, chewing, before I experienced a sensation so alien to me as to seem perverse: the desire for a vegetable. The closest I’d come so far, if you don’t count kale—which I don’t—was a grilled artichoke heart. (It will go without saying that I had not encountered a single Austrian winter pea.)

  I consulted my program, to no avail. At last, I spotted a flash of greenery along the far wall and hurried over. A dispirited blond woman seemed to be breaking down the booth, which included a pile of carrots and bell peppers.

  “What are you selling?” I said.

  “Frozen vegetables,” she muttered.

  “They look great,” I said. “Great-looking vegetables.”

  “Those are props,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “The product is a diced, frozen vegetable medley. But I’m closed for the day.” She must have felt like a Hare Krishna at a tent revival.

  “I understand completely,” I said. “But I’d love a pepper, if you can spare it.”

  She looked at me. “A pepper?”

  “Yeah. One of those peppers.”

  “Those are props,” she said again. “They’re shellacked.”

  HOW WILL THE SPUD SURVIVE?

  When I got back to the factory Dave was poring over the old ledgers. He’d found some sales figures. “We made a profit of $50,000 in 1918. Then, the next year, we had revenues of $255,000, which is, like, $25 million today. We were probably one of the top 20 candy companies in the country at that point. We provided all the candy for the state of Idaho and beyond. I look at these numbers and just drool.”

  Dave clearly had a soft spot for history. He also had a sense of perspective, though. He knew what came next: the lean years of the Depression, the rise of the national giants, then, the darkest hour—a spectacularly misguided effort, during the sixties, to take the Spud bar national. Dave harbored no such fantasies. He knew that the Spud was mostly a novelty product, something folks bought at the airport and brought home as a souvenir. He made 3 million Spuds per year, 120,000 Cherry Cocktails, and 60,000 Old Faithfuls. Mars made that many Snickers bars in an afternoon. His hopes for the growth of the manufacturing side were modest, a few percent a year, if possible.

  Ironically, he said, it was the distribution side of the business—a venture he dismissed as “just moving boxes from here to there”—that had thrived, more than tripling in size over the past 20 years. Dave had more than 9,000 items in his warehouse, which he sold to some 800 different supermarkets and convenience stores. He was intimately familiar with the real -politik of modern retail.

  “There’s an unbelievable amount of money that flows into the back of the chains,” he said. And not just in slotting fees. Virtually every time a company places a product in a store, they pay in some form. A presell, which is two weeks of free product. Or a discount on price. Idaho Candy couldn’t afford any of this, so they tended to get lost. “The big guys say, ‘I’m sorry, we’re paying $20,000 per store and we don’t want any of that other bullshit in there.’ When I deal with them as a manufacturer, they’re friendly enough. But in the store, it’s brutal.”

  There was little Dave could do to increase demand for the Spud, let alone a bar like the Old Faithful. He practiced some guerilla marketing, giving Spuds to the cheerleaders at Boise State games to throw out to the crowd, that kind of stuff. He was also considering individually wrapping Spud Bites and doing more specialty products.

  I myself had been thinking about a possible new bar on my way back from lunch, the Huckleberry Hound: a huckleberry-flavored nougat covered in bittersweet chocolate. I could see the soft purple of the nougat framed by dark chocolate, and I could taste it as well, the sweet fruity fluff tempered by coffee tones. I realized there might be some hassle regarding the name, but Hanna-Barbera (or whoever owned the copyright) could eventually be prevailed upon. This was synergy, after all. Cross promotion.

  Dave’s response was, well, muted. “I do want to do more with the huckleberry,” he said, cautiously. “But I was thinking more like a Huckleberry Cocktail.”

  It was getting on toward four. Dave offered to drive me to the airport. We could pay a visit to the distribution warehouse on the way. And, of course, he wanted to give me a few candy bars for the road, so we took one last swing through the factory. Before we could get too far, a young woman called over to Dave in a distinct tone of anguish. She pointed to an older woman, who was cradling her left hand in her right.

  “What happened here?” Dave said.

  “The glue gun,” the young woman said.

  The older woman held out her hand. A nasty pink welt ran half the length of her thumb. Dave winced and ran off to get the first aid kit and when he came back he said, “You need to run that under some cold water and put some disinfectant on and then put a bandage on it. Take the disinfectant home if you need to. Change the bandage frequently. And remember that glue gun is really hot.”

  Both women nodded. They appeared to have picked up on this already.

  We left the factory via the loading dock and headed toward his warehouse. The sun had flattened out and turned the foot -hills around Boise a soft gold. The gentle, rolling terrain reminded me of northern California, without the oak trees. For more than a century, sheep had wandered these valleys, conducting their business in peace. Now a rash of fancy homes was creeping up the hillsides. If you listened carefully you could hear t
he hammers pounding away like cap guns.

  Dave looked pretty beat. He’d been working about 100 hours per week to get the new mogul up and running. A regular week, he assured me, was half that. “My dad used to work 70 a week. My brothers still do. That’s just too much for me. My wife, she only works three days a week. We’re not going to earn a ton of money. It’s just not our priority in life.”

  His wife was a dentist.

  We came to a red light and the car beside us tooted its horn. Dave looked over and waved.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Don’t know. They probably just saw the license plate. People in town sort of know me as the Candyman.”

  We pulled up to the warehouse, which was basically a convenience store on the scale of an airport hangar. To me, an admitted fat junkie, this was a mesmerizing setting, and I spent many minutes traipsing the endless rows of chips and Skittles and Slim Jims. Dave seemed restless. The truth was, he told me, he sometimes fantasized about selling off his great big snack palace. This was surely the wrong thing to do, in a business sense. But the place bored him silly. What he really wanted to show me was the new box he’d designed for Owyhee Butter Toffee.

  And so, after I’d finished ogling all the various munchies (and not, despite severe kleptomaniacal pangs, stealing any of them) he led me back to his office and set the box on a thick layer of invoices and order forms.

  “What do you think?” he asked me.

  I assured him the box was gorgeous. And it was. There was a photograph of the Idaho Candy Company taken in the thirties, showing a line of black cars and men in waistcoats posing out front. This was set against a matte background with gold trim. Beside the photograph was a brief history of the toffee recorded in elegant script.

  He asked me a few pointed questions, about color and composition. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t patronizing him. Finally, he seemed satisfied and set the box down between us.

  The more I talked with Dave, the more I was struck by his similarity to Marty Palmer. Both men had forsaken a highpowered career and returned home to take over a family business. Both were former athletes (Dave had been a state-ranked tennis player) who had settled into family life and become civic leaders. When I mentioned this to Dave, he shook his head. “I’m not as hard a pusher as Marty,” he said.

  This is what I probably liked most about Dave Wagers, in the end. He retained a necessary fascination with the teleology of capitalism, which is to maximize profit. But he could also see that there was a spiritual price to be paid for all that striving. Roiling within him was a messier, less-profitable impulse—the wish to create.

  11

  THE PAST IS JUST AHEAD

  I spent my entire youth eating the candy bars produced by the Annabelle Candy Company. I didn’t know this at the time. I wasn’t, as they say, an informed consumer. But the record stands: Hadn’t the cop who nearly cuffed me for arson found on my person a half-eaten Big Hunk? Hadn’t my older brother Dave once promised to give me an Abba-Zaba if I agreed to search the graveyard next to Terman Junior High for his Estes rocket? (And hadn’t he subsequently reneged, claiming that an oral agreement did not constitute, as such, a binding contract?) Hadn’t my father, the estimable Richard, once thrown a frozen Rocky Road across the room during a moment of paternal frustration. Or was that a U-no bar?

  No matter. My point is that Annabelle candy bars were a touchstone of my youth. I knew the names and wrappers and tastes and textures by heart. Then, as happens in the modern candy game, they disappeared entirely from my life, once I left California. I spent a good many hours trying to explain the Big Hunk to friends from the East Coast.

  Vanilla taffy? Vanilla taffy and peanuts? Sounds gross.

  No, no. It’s delicious. Really.

  The problem was that I hadn’t actually eaten a Big Hunk since I was fourteen.

  So it was with a certain Homeric sense of closure that I strolled into Annabelle headquarters, located on the aptly named Industrial Boulevard in the gritty East Bay burg of Hayward. I was met, almost immediately, by Susan Karl, the president of Annabelle. A short, dark-haired woman in a blue blazer and slacks, she looked, if I may be candid, very much like my own mother (though, for the record, my mother has never worn red, square-framed glasses). The physical similarity was no doubt accentuated by Karl’s demeanor, which I would describe as both highly competent and pleasantly neurotic.

  “Okay,” she said, ushering me into her office, “so you’re working on something. What? A book? I’d like a copy of what -ever you’re going to write. And I’d prefer if you don’t make me sound like an idiot.” It was clear to me—and would become only more so—that making Susan Karl sound like an idiot would take some doing.

  The company, she noted, was founded by her grandfather, Sam Altshuler, who immigrated from Russia in 1917, settled in San Francisco, and started making the Rocky Road in his kitchen. He sold the confection from a pushcart on Market Street. The business, which he named after his only child, failed several times. This did little to deter Altshuler. Above Karl’s desk was a photo of the groundbreaking of the Hayward factory, taken in 1965. “The little girl is me,” she said. “I was sick from school that day, so I got to come. Isn’t that cool?”

  Karl’s memories of her grandfather were vivid. “He doted on me. I could do no wrong in his eyes. He lived with us for quite a while and what I remember is that he always smelled like chocolate and there was marshmallow all over his shoes every day. My friends thought that was so cool, but to me it was just, like, normal.”

  When Altshuler passed away, in 1971, his daughter, Annabelle, took over. Karl’s brother took the helm some years later. Karl herself had little to do with the business. She moved to Los Angeles with her husband and became a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office. After a decade, she was appointed as a judge in Malibu. “With the robe and the whole thing,” she said. “I job-shared with a partner. We both had little kids, so part-time was perfect. I did civil and criminal, and I did have to put people in the slammer. Here’s my best story. Do you want to hear my best story? You know Jim Belushi? Well, he had a speeding ticket and he went to trial before me. He was adorable. So funny! It was all I could do to keep from losing it during the trial. I had to sit there like this.” Karl stared down at her desk with an expression of grim determination.

  Five years ago, she and her husband decided to move back to the Bay Area. They were tired of L.A. No one read there. So Karl decided to take over the family business, a decision that made her brother and mother ecstatic. “We’re profitable most years,” Karl told me. “We have a very loyal following. If you grew up in this part of the country, you’ve heard of us. The only people who’ve never heard of us are on the East Coast. But even there we’re making some headway. Take a look at this!”

  She directed my attention to a copy of the New York Times Magazine. One of the articles was about Dylan Lauren’s hip new Manhattan candy shop. The accompanying photo featured a selection of offbeat candy products and there, smack in the middle, were the Big Hunk and Look!

  In fact, Annabelle products—on the basis of sheer quirkiness—made frequent appearances in the zeitgeist. A memorable episode of Seinfeld showed George Costanza at his desk. He opened the top drawer and there, pictured for a long moment, was a Big Hunk. (The irony, not lost on Karl, is that Big Hunk was not, at that time, even sold in New York, where the show was set.) Abba-Zabas played a major role in the film Half Baked, a Dave Chappelle vehicle that had become a minor cult classic amongst pothead teenagers. Karl still got people approaching her booth at trade shows, catching sight of the Abba-Zabas, and saying, “Hey, Half Baked!” This was just fine with her. She considered it free advertising.

  Karl led me into the factory and up a set of stairs that allowed us a vista of the entire operation. It was a behemoth, 60,000 square feet in all, a jumble of catwalks and platforms and kettles and pipes and pumps, with dozens of workers in hard hats zipping to and fro across the wet concrete floor. Fro
m a distance it looked like industrial chaos, the sort of place Charlie Chaplin would have had a field day with.

  Karl moved briskly through the machinery, bent slightly forward at the waist, like a general inspecting her troops. She was wearing a jaunty yellow hard hat. “Okay, first thing, you can’t take any pictures of the area where we make Rocky Roads because the process is proprietary. Okay? My mother made me promise that I wouldn’t let anyone take pictures so, I’m sorry, I have to abide by her word. She’s still the boss, because she still owns a majority of the company, and besides, she’s my mother.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  This caveat might lead one to expect that the production of the Rocky Road was ultramodern. It was not. In fact, the process was little changed from the days of Grandpa Altshuler. One whole corner of the factory was devoted to a quartet of metal tables about 70 feet long and 4 feet across. It was here that the marshmallow was laid out to cool over -night, given an initial layer of chocolate and crushed cashews, and cut into manageable squares. Further down the line, a worker was peeling the wax paper off the squares (they had the appearance of chocolate floor tiles) and feeding them into a device that cut them into strips. A device nicknamed the “octopus” separated each of the strips and fed them onto their own miniconveyor belt. Further down the line they would be cut into bar-size pieces and enrobed again, then cooled and wrapped.

  The production of the Big Hunk began with peanuts, which were fried in oil, then hustled along a conveyor belt. “This woman is our inspector,” Karl noted. “She does nothing but throw out any peanuts that don’t look right. Like a peanut that’s black or something. We get very few complaints.”

  In the center of the factory was a cooking area composed of no fewer than thirteen kettles. It now became clear to me why I’d been required to wear a hard hat—because some of these kettles were being raised into the air.