Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (12 page)

Marty was done with the Bing part of the tour. We were only getting started, though. Rather than taking the lean-andmean approach of the Goldenbergs or relying on contract work—an honest but inevitably degrading arrangement—Marty had created a general line house of the old variety.

He marched me upstairs to the brittle room. Marty, I should note, was in sensational shape. He walked with that springy, pigeon-toed gait favored by ex-jocks. I figured he’d played soccer. “We didn’t have soccer here when I was growing up,” he said. “But I did run cross-country and I swam and raced sailboats.”

The main thing Marty wanted to emphasize about his brittle was that the peanuts should be floating in the middle, which could only be achieved by a precisely timed handstretching of the brittle. Baking soda caused the brittle to aerate, or, in laymen’s terms, to
puff up real fast
, so fast that I was briefly afraid the kettle being prepped would overflow and my shoes would be singed off by molten brittle. Instead, a couple of gloved workers grabbed the kettle and hoisted it over their heads and raced down the length of a cooling table, pouring the liquid brittle as they went. Now a flurry of activity began: one worker flattened the brittle with boards, a second, trailing behind, cut the brittle into squares, or hides, another flipped these over.

“See! The peanuts are starting to sink!” Marty explained. “What these guys are going to do is stretch the brittle, which lifts the peanuts up. If they wait too long, it’ll harden up.” In the 30 seconds Marty had taken to explain the process, the workers had finished. Marty stepped to the table and broke off a piece of brittle and held it very close to my face. “See,” he said. “Floating!”

Was Marty maybe going a little overboard on the floating peanut thing? Sure. But this was how he differentiated his product from the dozens of other brittles on the market. And more so, the story he told about his brittle was, in a sense, the story he was telling about himself. He was a craftsman. He regarded attention to detail as sacred. He took me to examine the copper kettles he used (the same kind as his grandfather) and the huge, scary peanut roaster, where redskins tumbled hypnotically around a bank of blue flame. He showed me the likewise huge and scary peanut fryer, which looked oddly like an ice cream cooler. Most of all, Marty wanted to emphasize the utmost importance of using these ingredients in an expeditious manner, to keep the “nutmeats from oxidizing” and becoming rancid. (I found myself repeating the word
nutmeat
for several weeks afterwards.)

As it should happen, we followed the fried peanuts downstairs, to the enrobing room on the first floor. Here, they were funneled into tiny metal baskets about the size of quarters. These baskets trudged along a conveyor belt and into a machine that drenched them in milk chocolate then lifted them off the conveyor belt, allowing the excess chocolate to drizzle off. This process—one I watched in a state of rapture for several minutes—created a spiffy little circular cluster. I have never been especially fond of peanut clusters, which always seemed a bit dry to me. Now I know why: because I had never eaten a cluster with
fried
peanuts.

On the line next door to the clusters, pretzels were being drenched in peanut butter. Another line had just finished a batch of pretzels enrobed in yogurt, with red and green Christmas drizzles. After Nestlé, Palmer was the nation’s largest producer of coated pretzel products. Actually, Marty couldn’t say this for sure, because there are no government statistics on coated pretzel products. But he was pretty sure.

The chocolate for all this coating came from a 60,000-pound vat in the basement. It was pumped upstairs, into an elaborate system of overhead pipes, then dumped into kettles for tempering. In the old days, Marty said, his staff had done all this by hand: broken the chocolate, melted it down, and slopped buckets from station to station. I found myself imagining a kind of Oompa Loompa free-for-all, with creepy greenand-orange dwarfs skating across floors slick with chocolate. It was not a pleasant vision.

“What do you mean by the ‘old days,’ ” I said. “Like, the fifties?”

Marty laughed. “Oh no, our new chocolate delivery system is six years old.”

In the repackaging department, a tall, ornate machine with steel pincers fed bulk candies into two-for-a-buck sacks. Repackaging, Marty explained, was another way for his company to eke out some profit. We watched batch after batch of gummy bears drop down onto the electronic scales.

When we got back to his office, I assumed Marty would tell me some heartwarming tale of visiting the factory as a kid and vowing someday to run the show. In fact, after high school Marty went off to the University of Colorado and spent five years there, collecting two degrees, one in engineering, the other in business. He interviewed with several companies after college. “I viewed the family business as an overgrown candy shop,” Marty said. “It wasn’t like: ‘Boy, I’d like to come out of college and run
that
.’ It was just a funky little deal.”

Then fate intervened. Or, well, maybe not fate. More like a management crisis. The two gentlemen running the candy company retired. They had assumed Marty
would
return home to take over. Or, more precisely, that he would return home to oversee the sale of the business: “People figured we were just going to let it go under and milk it for what we could.” Marty decided to do just the opposite.

When I asked him if he’d studied the recent history of the candy industry, and specifically the gradual extinction of smaller companies, he nodded eagerly. “Yeah, I didn’t care. I realized there was huge growth possible and there was going to be risk to it, but it
could
work, if we were willing to work hard. And the reason was this: the bigger the big guys get, the bigger the crumbs they leave on the table. Because frankly, if you’re Mars or Hershey’s, you don’t even want to bother with a $10 million line.” Marty paused and smiled broadly. “Well,
I
can make a fat lunch on that.”

Marty knew that the Twin Bing was his flagship product. There were similar products on the market, such as the Cherry Mash down in Missouri, and the Mountain Bar, out in the Northwest. Bings dominated the ten northern midwestern states. His first impulse was to maximize sales within that zone. But the Bing, as it turned out, was already doing pretty well. It was the number four bar, for instance, in South Dakota. The real problem was that
no one lived in South Dakota
. Marty had a grand total of 5 million people within 400 miles of his plant. So he realized pretty quickly that he was not going to keep the lights on only doing Twin Bings.

Instead, he looked back at the history of the business, which his great-great-grandfather Edward Cook Palmer began, back in 1878, as a wholesale grocery. Edward’s son, William, had made the move into candy at the turn of the century. Back then, Palmer was a general merchandise house. This was the strategy Marty adopted. His logic was simple: If you’re a retailer, you only want to buy from one candy guy.

Marty was not blind to the realities of competing against companies a thousand times his size. But his tone conveyed the unmistakable swagger of an underdog who gloried in the odds against him. It occurred to me, as I watched him lean across his desk to emphasize his points, that he had probably been a very good athlete. “When we go knock on the door of the buyer, one of our biggest strengths is that we’re
not
Mars or Hershey’s. These guys say, ‘Geez, you guys are the old style aren’t you? Just making a go of it. That’s great!’ They’ll look right at me and say, ‘You can’t really pay a $20,000 slotting fee, can you? How about $5 off the first 100 cases?’ So we play let’s make a deal. I truly believe, if a buyer is faced with a pretty level field and if it’s close on cost they’ll buy from me, because they’ve got an American flag tattooed on their heart.”

This wasn’t to say that Marty hadn’t felt the squeeze of the Big Three. The example that leaped to mind was his chocolatecovered pretzel. For years, it had been a strong seller. Then Nestlé came along with Flipz. They spent millions of dollars in advertising to establish a national brand, and they took away a lot of Marty’s business. The battle for seasonal sales had been vicious, as well. “The big guys can always come in and say: ‘Would you like a better price on your everyday Butterfinger? Okay, but you need to buy fifteen items from us. How about if you buy this Butterfinger in a Christmas wrapper?’ They can bring the power of their other brands to bear, because retailers can’t live without Snickers or M&M’s.” Marty didn’t sound bitter about any of these practices. Hell, they were simply good business. Such competitive disadvantages only made him more determined to turn Palmer into a regional powerhouse.

Over the years, Marty had received a lot of offers from people who wanted to buy the business, or a portion of it. It was their assumption that Palmer, as a small, independent candy company, was on its last legs. Marty’s standard response was to agree to sell the business if the potential buyer agreed to pay him what he knew the business was going to be worth in ten years. He would then provide an estimate—rather a large estimate—and the buyer would, often in a state of pique, demur. Marty enjoyed these exchanges a great deal. They were one of the dividends of his hard work.

Another was the chance to produce—or, at least, to fantasize about producing—new products. He realized that kids these days were more interested in handfuls of things and sours. But Marty himself favored “the old soldiers,” vanished candy bars of yesteryear. His most cherished dream was to reintroduce a bar called the Walnut Crush, which had been made by the Fenn Brothers, up in Sioux Falls, 100 miles north. “That was a delicious bar,” Marty said, a little dreamily. “It was kind of like a 3 Musketeers, but the filling was bright white and it had a walnut flavor and a different texture, what we call ‘short,’ which is a baking term, meaning that it bites off cleanly, it doesn’t pull. It was covered in dark chocolate. A very unusual piece.”

The Fenn Brothers went out of business in the early seventies. When Marty took over, he tracked down the old formula and found a few former employees, who described how they made the Walnut Crush: laying the centers on cookie sheets and drying them for three days. That process had given the Crush its distinct snap, but it also made the bar impossible to mass produce, at least profitably. Marty’s heart seemed to sink a little at the memory.

He was, after all, being asked (or asking himself) to play two conflicting roles simultaneously: Guardian of the Past and Forward-Thinking Business Owner. This duality was apparent everywhere, in his business decisions, in the factory’s mishmash of new and old equipment, even in the decor of his office, which included a sleek computer as well as a framed piece that I’d been eyeing curiously. It appeared to be an aged strip of cloth stitched with the Palmer name, along with the legend
DELICIOUS CHOCOLATES SOLD HERE
. “Actually, that’s a branded calfskin,” Marty said. This was a nod to Sioux City’s legacy as a leader in the meat industry. Back at the turn of the century, Palmer delivered its candies as far as a horse-drawn wagon could travel in a day. These wagon jobbers would often nail a calfskin sign to a post out front of the dry goods stores they visited. “These guys were the Bud signs of their day.” He had framed his.

He had a lot of other relics, too, stuff he couldn’t quite bring himself to throw out, though he knew he probably should. “It is nice to have a little history around,” he said, almost apologetically. “It helps you remember where you came from. My grandfather used to come in all the time to chew the fat. He told me about this promotion they used to run for a boxed chocolate product called Lucky Day, or Golden Strike, something having to do with luck. What he would do is cook up a batch of 300 pounds of soft nougat and throw a handful of gold coins into the batch and then of course they’d be made into candy. As a consumer, you knew you might get a piece of gold. You’d get arrested today for doing things that used to be good marketing.” Marty shook his head.

While we’d been talking, a secretary had appeared and placed a box of chocolate pretzels and clusters on his desk. These were my parting gifts. We climbed into his SUV, which was about the size of my apartment, and cruised toward town.

Sioux City is best known, historically, as the starting point of Lewis and Clark’s westward expedition. There is a large, phallic monument not far from the Morrell plant commemorating the explorers, as well as a business park environment named after them. In fact, Sioux City had been the biggest town between Chicago and Denver at the dawn of the twentieth century. But then someone had paid off someone else and the railroad had gotten routed through Omaha and Sioux City had gone into a steady decline.

The city was enjoying a renaissance, though, in part due to Gateway, which had come to town and brought 7,000 jobs. Marty cited the restoration of the Orpheum Theater, where he had gone the previous evening to see
Riverdance
. The city was also hard at work on a 10,000-square-foot events center. Marty was especially pleased by this project, because it was being built right next to the old Palmer factory, the first floor of which was still being used as a candy shop. We paid the shop a brief visit so Marty could show me the cracks in the tiled floor, the result of two errant boxcars which, back in 1931, bounded across the street and crashed into the front of the building.

Just before he dropped me off at the Greyhound bus station, I asked Marty if he ever questioned the decision he’d made to return to Sioux City. He said no, not really, that he realized the place wasn’t Paris, but this is where his factory was and he felt a responsibility toward the 100 workers he employed. He had no delusions about the future. “It would be neat to have a sixth generation,” he said, gazing at the fleet of gantry cranes that loomed over his downtown. “But you never know what kids will want to do.” It seemed to me, in that moment, that Marty Palmer was straddling the two worlds that compose our lives, the past and the present, with tremendous grace.