True Confections (30 page)

In 2003, when we were in Chicago and everyone was talking about Just Born having bought the fourth-generation Golden-berg Candy Company (makers of Peanut Chews in Philadelphia since 1890), I overheard Howard telling a buyer that he was hoping that one of these days Just Born or Annabelle would make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I didn’t say anything until the show was over and we were at O’Hare and checked in for our flight to Hartford. When I finally confronted Howard about what I had heard him say, we had a fight, right there in the boarding area. Our seats were in different rows on the flight
home; Howard had assured me he had booked our seats together, but he neglected to follow through on that, and neither of us attempted to swap with other passengers in order to sit together.

A
FTER MY WHITE-CHOCOLATE
epiphany in the Green & Black’s booth, I asked Julie to scout out some other white-chocolate samples from around the show, and back at our hotel that first night, we spread them on a clean towel on the bedspread and sampled our way through them. You know these brands, all the usual suspects. Most of them were terrible. A few were barely acceptable. Nothing was good. I took out the Green & Black’s white-chocolate bar I had helped myself to after that transcendent taste; we swigged some water to clear our palates, and then we each took a bite. What a significant contrast to everything we had just tasted. It was rich and creamy, and the vanilla was powerfully fragrant. It was the combination of the high-quality vanilla from Madagascar and the very pure cocoa butter from their high-quality organic Trinitario cacao beans, which are from Belize or the Dominican Republic.

“We could do this,” Julie said, licking some crumbs off the wrapper. Between us we had devoured the entire hundred-gram bar. I asked her what she was thinking. “Couldn’t we do something with white chocolate, like White Tigermelts?” Perhaps this was it, a white-chocolate product extension as the optimal first step for Zip’s. We could do something with Little Sammies or Tigermelts and high-quality white chocolate, without losing our identity, without getting too fancy. I looked at the array of undistinguished white-chocolate brand extensions strewn on the towel, each one missing a sampled corner. They were each bitter, chalky, or harsh, with that chemical telltale aftertaste of vanillin,
the cheap and artificial vanilla substitute that Zip’s Candies has never used and never will. (Most months now we go through three fifty-gallon drums of Czaplinsky’s Pure Madagascar Vanilla, which has always been an ingredient in both Tigermelts and Little Sammies, and is now a significant flavoring in our Bao-Bar as well.) In contrast to the creamy luxe taste and mouthfeel of the Green & Black’s white bar, there was no comparison. This is how you figure out what not to do, sampling this way.

It was nice to have Julie at the show that year especially, and it was a rare moment for the two of us to share a hotel room and spend some time alone, since Julie and Kelly are very rarely apart. That was the same trip when Julie suggested to me that I should consider becoming a situational lesbian because I would have more options for finding a new partner after the divorce. I didn’t and don’t see it, but in a curious way her thinking about me this way was flattering, like an invitation to join an exclusive guild.

That night I had one of my Zip’s dreams, as I often do when I am just falling asleep or am on the verge of waking up. I think there is something about the endless repetitive movements and sounds of the factory that penetrates my unconscious mind and manifests as complex and fantastical machinery that is often out of control, with switches I cannot reach, and dials and indicators I cannot read. There are weirdly intricate and clearly sexual images of things with apertures closing to slits and opening to quivering gaping orifices, and there are often strange cylindrical objects being thrust into slots and receptacles, over and over and over, with an urgent mechanical insistence; often, too, there are disturbing mucilaginous substances being extruded in menacing coils, or oozing out of or into places they shouldn’t. Sometimes I don’t recognize the viscid matter at all, but other times Little
Sammies are piling up uncontrollably, or enormous Mumbo Jumbos are rolling toward me like runaway wagon wheels. I start awake from these dreams tasting a faint note of chocolate, cherry, and anise in the back of my throat. Dr. Gibraltar once told me that my dreams like this are probably not really dreams, but are more likely hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. Whatever—they’re vivid and exhausting. Mornings after those nights, I feel as if I’ve worked an overnight shift.

This was a Little Sammies dream, but the Little Sammies were white.

I
T WASN’T VERY
difficult to make Little Susies. The most challenging element was creating a new mold that had a little less volume than the Little Sammies, but was clearly a girl in a dress, with more feminine features. The figures are pretty blobby anyway, so the details of the head didn’t matter as much as the shape of the body. The Halloween crisis of 1981 had taught me how to hand-dip Little Sammies, even though in the end that got us nowhere close to an approximation of the panned hard, shiny shell. But Little Susie, as I conceived of the product, our first brand extension, wouldn’t be panned at all. Even if we could match the shell coating, it wouldn’t have enough thickness to give a real white-chocolate flavor, and I didn’t want just an appearance of white chocolate, I really wanted that flavor to come through. Little Susies would be dipped in white chocolate. The slightly smaller interior core of the same fudgy mixture as the Little Sammies (the core ingredients for Little Sammies are sugar, corn syrup, molasses, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, condensed skim milk, cocoa solids, whey, soy lecithin, salt, and vanilla) would allow the finished piece to match the Little Sammies and fit in the packaging, because the balance of
the thickness would be added with the pure white-chocolate enrobing.

Little Susies would offer a pleasing contrast to Little Sammies. Little Sammies are boys. They’re shiny; they’re fudgy. Little Susies would be girls, with creamy smooth white chocolate on the outside, but with the familiar Little Sammies recipe core. How could this not be a winner? It was innovative, but still familiar. I wished Howard could be a part of this, sharing with me the birth of Zip’s Candies’ new baby. If only I had thought of Little Susies sooner. I believe it would have been a bond between us.

I
WORKED FOR
the next couple of months with Jacob and two of my most loyal and experienced employees, Petey Leventhal and Sally Fernstein, developing the Little Susies slowly and carefully, troubleshooting batch by batch. We figured it out, and began our laborious production in earnest. In the last hour of each Little Sammies shift, we made cores for Little Susies, and then the four of us would do the white-chocolate enrobing dip, sixty at a time.

In this way we began to build some prototype stock in order to have samples for CandyCon at Javits, in September. It’s the other big show we do, every fall. It’s a little smaller than All Candy, but it’s a bigger show for us—we take a bigger space and have more people on the floor, because we can truck everything down from New Haven instead of airfreighting our stock and worrying about Tigermelts melting and resolidifying out of temper along the way, and we don’t have to rent as much furnishings for the booth, either.

It was now August. We hit our stride and were able to produce a consistent product, batch to batch. My plan had been to sample Little Susies at the Con and get enough orders to pay for
a proper line setup, and to develop a design and print the new labels we would need. I had a vision of something that would mirror the Little Sammies wrapper, but in contrasting colors and with the words
white chocolate
on the green umbrella. Once they were in production, I could see running the Little Susies on the Little Sammies line every third or fourth day, and then, who knows, if sales were significant and sustained after the true rollout, we would consider a dedicated line.

The white chocolate cost Zip’s—well, a lot. More than I want to say right now. If there is going to be a forensic accountant reviewing our books anyway, fine; let him hunt for that information if it’s so important to Irene. It was a reasonable decision. In the press of those hectic weeks, I made the choice to triage our energies and go with a sure thing, knowing that at a later stage we would have to develop our own white-chocolate enrobing recipe. We used Green & Black’s white chocolate for our Little Susies prototypes. It tempered beautifully. Well-tempered chocolate is glossy, breaks with a clean, crisp snap, and has a molten mouthfeel. Badly tempered chocolate feels gritty and crumbly in your mouth. It is the taste of failure, disappointment, and broken promises.

The Little Susies were perfect, if I do say so. It was a great combination, the soft fudgy core, identical to Little Sammies except, going for a contrast with Little Sammies, and also following Sam’s advice, with a slightly saltier formulation, which played beautifully off the nicely tempered white chocolate. The proportion was very good. Little Susies were a great innovation. Fantastic mouthfeel, tremendously appealing in alternating bites with Little Sammies. A brilliant product extension. This is undeniable.

W
E HIT A
snag when we realized that we really didn’t know how to put Little Susies in the hands of buyers at CandyCon in an advantageous way. They didn’t look good enough to display on plates or in bowls—Little Sammies would also look like nothing much if displayed that way. The packaging is important. Who would want naked Idaho Spud Bars? Unwrapped, they look … well, I don’t want to say how they look; it would be disrespectful. (Unwrap one yourself, if you’re curious.) Anyway, if you think about it, out of the wrapper, all the bestselling bars are just five indistinguishable inches of lumpy brownness. Once the buyers walked away from the booth with some unwrapped Little Susies, what would they have? A one-page handout and some pathetic bare samples in a plastic bag? We would have to do better than that. We needed to launch Little Susies decisively.

In any case, although I had envisaged Little Susies being packaged three to a pack, just like Little Sammies, I was reluctant to give our precious handmade prototypes away three at a time, which is what we would have to do if they were packaged in a standard pack. What had we gotten ourselves into? We had already invested an insane amount of hand labor at each stage of production along the line in order to create a finished product that could pass as a manufactured candy already in production. Even if we had enough stock, we had a wrapping problem. I couldn’t just put Little Susies into Little Sammies wrappers, and we didn’t have a Little Susies wrapper. We weren’t prepared. We had to think fast. The Con was now ten days away.

Jacob and I were dipping what would have to be the last batch of Little Susies on our own, and the third shift was leaving. We worked together without speaking, and then he said quietly, as we moved a completed tray of sixty Little Susies to the drying rack, “I have an idea.” He cocked his head for me to follow him, and after the tray was locked in place, I did. He led me
to a worktable where he had laid out a row of some thirty alternating Little Sammies and Little Susies. Jacob explained that he had just been fooling around at first, but now he wondered if this might be the answer. We could package Little Susies in with Little Sammies in specially marked packs as a promotional gimmick at the CandyCon.

Of course! It was perfect. I loved the way they looked lined up that way. Together, he and I created another row, and another, in reverse alternation so as to form a checkerboard pattern of Little Sammies and Little Susies. It was striking, and it would be perfect for our Little Susies display strategy in the Zip’s booth at CandyCon. Jacob took a Little Sammies cardboard sleeve and placed two little Sammies on either side of a Little Susie. The three fit perfectly together. We could run these through the usual wrapping machine, and then get some rush-printed “Little Susies” stickers that we could slap onto those Little Sammies packs to distinguish them from the regular stock. The stickers would have the added ingredients of the white-chocolate enrobing in agate type running around the “Little Susies” lettering. We certainly weren’t going to identify the source of the white chocolate, so we decided simply to list the ingredients (cane sugar, cocoa butter, milk powder, soy lecithin, vanilla extract), omitting the organic designation, since there is nothing organic about our products ordinarily, and that term, while true for the time being about the enrobing, wasn’t our kind of word. So that’s what we did.

W
E DROVE DOWN
to the show in a convoy of Zip’s Candies trucks and vans, with our usual show stock and twenty boxes of the specially stickered Little Sammies/Little Susies packs, forty-eight to each box. We had almost a thousand Little Susie
giveaway packs, and we had about fifty more Little Susies to display in a glass countertop flat case, which Jacob would set up with that striking checkerboard arrangement of Little Sammies and Little Susies.