Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (6 page)

First, the presence of huge, precisely calibrated machinery just
made me hot
. This has to do with my own mechanical ineptitude, which is of a degree that I recently spent two and a half hours attempting to replace my windshield wipers. For me, the chance to watch a mechanical process—the flawless execution of a series of intricate actions, the stainless steel ingenuity of it all—was deeply reassuring. It restored my faith in physics, a discipline I have never quite understood, despite having taken an Advanced Placement course senior year in high school. Most humans share this fascination, because we are, by our nature, messy, flawed, inconsistent, conflicted. Mass production is the opposite of all these things.

We are, furthermore, in the midst of what I would call a
radical object disconnect
. For most of human history, people essentially knew where their stuff came from. The farmer grew your carrots. The tailor stitched your britches. The cobbler made your shoes. But as the world has become industrialized, people have drifted away from the means of production. Technology is out there, somewhere, banging out our products in ever more sophisticated manners, and they show up brightly wrapped in our vast emporiums and we pay for them with plastic cards. Watching the process by which our products are made reconnects us to the wonders of production. Indeed, it provides a soothing sense of technology as our benefactor, in a naïve every-day-in-every-way-we-are-getting-better-and-better kind of way.

The candy factory, in particular, places all the foul props of the modern age in the service of our most innocent desires. To watch huge, metal machines plink out delicate chocolate bunnies—what delicious irony! The bogeyman of technology tamed! Bunnies not bombs! This is a bunch of crapola, of course. Candy companies are servants of late-model capitalism, just as surely as Exxon and Dow. They dehumanize workers, both here and abroad, and pump out pollution and provide an indulgence that is unconscionable, given the great many people on the planet who are starving to death—which is all the more reason to lose oneself in the trance. In the trance, all that matters is the thing before you: the sheen of the chocolate, the tumble of peanuts, the dappled river of caramel, the miraculous union of these parts into a whole.

At a certain point, Saborin realized I’d fallen under the chocolate spell. He came and gently touched my elbow. “You okay?”

I nodded, a little dizzily. “It’s just so lovely.”

“Wait till next year,” he said. “We’re moving to a new factory over in Revere. All new machines. It’ll make this place look like the Stone Age.”

3

A TOP-SECRET CHOCOLATE SITUATION

I was pretty fired up now, as it had become clear to me that actual professionals in the candy industry would grant me access to actual candy factories. So I decided to call Tootsie Roll Industries, the Chicago-based company that owns Cambridge Brands, Boston’s other major candy concern. Its factory, the last remaining on Confectioner’s Row, produced Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, and Charleston Chews.

I explained to Ellen Gordon, the president, that I was a huge fan of Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops, that I had done some major bonding with my dad over Junior Mints, that I had frozen approximately 243 Strawberry Charleston Chews over the years and cracked each and every one of them on the kitchen counter of our old house on Wilkie Way, that it was very likely microscopic shards of said product which accounted for the chronic ant problem we experienced during my middle school years, and that given all this I would be more than happy to tour the Cambridge Brands plant at her convenience.

Ms. Gordon laughed politely and explained that no such visit would be possible. For competitive reasons, she said, not impolitely. She assured me that the manufacturing process for the products in question was proprietary and that the company’s equipment was beyond state of the art.

“Beyond state of the art,” I said. “Surely you jest. Junior Mints enrobed with lasers? Genetically engineered Sugar Babies?”

“Sorry,” Gordon said.

As it turns out, the larger candy manufacturers are notoriously secretive operations. I had always assumed that the industrial espionage in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
was trumped-up fiction. Not so. Roald Dahl based his book on the legendary exploits of the Cadburys and Rowntrees, who routinely sent moles to spy on one another’s operations.

A young Forrest Mars, the founder of Mars (which now goes by the yummy-sounding name Masterfoods, and which I will continue to refer to as Mars, both out of antiglobalist zeal and basic kindness to the reader), briefly worked in a Swiss chocolate factory, for the express purpose of sussing out trade secrets. His chief competitor, Milton S. Hershey, reportedly toured various Swiss factories during the era when he was trying to learn how to make milk chocolate.

There are three reasons that espionage remains such a big anxiety in the candy industry:

1. You can’t patent a chocolate bar. You can patent a name and a wrapper and a logo. But the recipes and ingredients are fair game; there is nothing to stop a competitor from selling a copycat version of your product. Hershey’s Skor Bar, for instance, was a bald-faced attempt to win the chocolatecovered-butter-toffee market from the Heath bar. (Hershey’s eventually wound up purchasing Heath, thus ensuring a total monopoly.)

2. The staple ingredients of most candies are quite similar, which means that the vital data resides in the manufacturing process.

3. Success, in the candy market, often has less to do with producing the best candy as with getting to market first. When a candy company comes up with a popular innovation—such as the production of a snack-size bar—the competition had better figure out how to match the feat, and quickly.

I spoke to Joël Glenn Brenner about all this, because she was probably better qualified than anyone to discuss the paranoia that pervades the candy industry. Several years ago, she published a terrific book called
The Emperors of Chocolate
, which detailed the vicious historical competition between Mars and Hershey. As a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, Brenner spent years attempting to gain access to the Mars plant, a process she described as “pretty miserable. It’s just a terribly closed environment.”

And not just to nosy reporters. As Brenner observed in her book, outside workers called in to repair machinery in areas considered proprietary are blindfolded, allowed to fix the machine in question, then blindfolded and escorted out of the plant. Hershey’s isn’t much better. The company may try to project a fuzzy, all-American image, but we’re talking about an operation that
shreds its marketing plans
.

On the other hand, Brenner said, the secrecy is necessary to some extent. There are secrets in the industry worth millions, and the only way to get them is to get inside the plant, or to pay someone to get inside. “Look at the Wonderball fiasco,” Brenner said. The Wonderball is a Nestlé product, basically a milk chocolate ball with hard candies inside. There were a couple of companies that wanted to introduce the same kind of product in America, and the result was a frenzy of spying, or alleged spying, amongst the larger candy companies. This happened all of three years ago. The competition to get to market is that fierce. In a tone of undisguised relief, Brenner told me that she no longer covered the candy industry. But the trend in candy was the same as elsewhere, she assured me, “The big guys gobble up the little guys or drive them out of business.” This has resulted in an industry that operates on two distinct planes:

1. The Big Three (Nestlé, Hershey’s, Mars); and

2. All the other little freaks.

Nestlé was launched 125 years ago by the milk chocolate pioneer Henri Nestlé. In recent years, the Swiss company has become a multinational behemoth, snapping up the British chocolate giant Rowntree, the Italian Perugina, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Oh Henry! and a dozen other brands.

Most Americans had never even heard of chocolate in 1893, when Milton S. Hershey attended the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. (The question that leaps to mind here, rather stubbornly, is why on earth they would want to go on living, but I will leave that aside for now.) Hershey himself made caramels, but the moment he saw and smelled the exhibit devoted to producing chocolate bars he knew he was witnessing the freak of the future and snapped up the entire operation. He spent a decade figuring out how to mass-produce milk chocolate bars and, just as important, sold them in previously unheardof venues—groceries, pharmacies, diners. The empire has expanded to include Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milk Duds, Almond Joy, Heath, Whatchamacallit, and some dozen other bars. (Fun fact: The
S
stands for Snavely.)

Forrest Mars went through his share of failures as a confectioner—among his numerous flops was a pineappleflavored Mars bar—but by the forties he had established himself as Hershey’s chief competitor. Shrewd, abstemious, and famously publicity shy, Mars was the first man to recognize the global reach of the candy bar market. Among the company’s gazillion products are Milky Way, M&M’s, and the most popular candy bar in America, Snickers.

THE POLITICS OF THE RACK

All this is worth noting, in a
Wall Street Journal
ish sort of way. But it was the second group, the little guys, that intrigued me. In my own pathologically romantic sense of things, I viewed these companies as throwbacks to the bygone era of candy, when each town had its own individual brands. And the good peoples of this country would gather together in public squares with lots of trees and perhaps a fellow picking a banjo, and they would partake of the particular candy bar produced in their town and feel a surge of sucrose-fueled civic identity. What I really wanted to do was to visit these companies—if any still existed—and to chronicle their struggles for survival in this wicked age of homogeneity, and, not incidentally, to load up on free candy.

But I needed a source still in the business. I turned to Lisbeth Echeandia, the former publisher of
Confectioner Magazine
. Echeandia, now a candy consultant, lives in Texas and is married to a Spaniard but is, in fact, confusingly, Australian. She thought my idea was just lovely, maybe even historically vital, given that so many smaller candy companies were going belly-up. The industry would eventually consist of 150 companies, she predicted, down from the 6,000 concerns that thrived during the boom years between the World Wars. This was not a particularly controversial forecast in the candy world. Echeandia was also a champion of the small, independent candy companies. “It’s so tough for them to survive,” she said, “with these slotting fees.”

“What’s a slotting fee?” I said.

“If you want your product on the racks,” she explained, “you have to pay a slotting fee. And they can be very expensive.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “You mean companies have to
pay
to get their stuff into stores?”

Yup.

Echeandia explained that the larger retail chains charge tens of thousands of dollars to place a particular candy bar in the racks near the register. Very few people, after all, head into the supermarket with Twix on their shopping list. Instead, they get stuck in the checkout line and the candy rack starts to call out to them, sirenlike, and they take a look at the wrappers and get a freakbuzz, accompanied, invariably, by the Guilt Hammer, which strikes them just behind the left ear. And if you watch people carefully around these racks—as I do—you can see this terrible internal struggle played out: the sideways glance at the wrappers, the contrite straightening up, the useless effort to lose oneself in the gossip rags (
BEN EATS J-LO’S ASS IN BLOODY CANNIBAL FEAST
!) followed by a second, lingering inspection, during which the consumer is, in fact, fantasizing about the various candy bars, imagining them naked, conjuring up that first, illicit bite, followed sometimes by a soft fingering of the wrapper, and, in most cases, a furious snatch of the desired bar, to be buried beneath the healthiest item in the basket. Oh woe to us so staggered by our self-love!

If there’s a child involved, this conflict is neatly externalized. He or she plays the role of tyrannical id, while the adult, usually a mother already worn down by the rigors of guiding a tyrannical id through fourteen aisles, offers token resistance. (Note that the average height of most candy racks corresponds directly to the height of a child.) During a visit to my local market, I heard the following exchange between a girl of about eight and her father.

GIRL
: Does everyone die?

DAD
: You’re not going to die for a long time, honey.

GIRL
: But everyone does die, right?

DAD
: Not for a long, long time.

GIRL
: Maddy told me everyone dies.

DAD
: Maddy (inaudible).

GIRL
: Aren’t you afraid to die, Dad?

DAD
: You know what, sweetie? You shouldn’t worry about things like that. You know what you should worry about? Just being alive and being happy.

GIRL
: (pause) Dad, can we get Hershey’s Kisses?

Obviously, those companies without the financial resources to afford slotting fees are at a huge disadvantage. They can’t get stocked at the major chain supermarkets or convenience stores or pharmacies. They have to make do at the smaller, independent outlets—which are themselves being driven out of business—or at discount stores.

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.