Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (11 page)

There was no time for questions, or excuses. Joanne had hustled me into a warm room that reeked of coconut. On the far side was a machine I recognized as a depositor. A worker was dumping what looked like corn chowder into the hopper at the top of the depositor. Down below, this batter was blorping out onto pans covered with waxed paper. The idea, I gathered, was for the batter to be drawn up to a point, like a Hershey’s Kiss, or, more remotely, a haystack. But the consistency was far too watery. As they trundled away from the depositor, the haystacks flattened out into disks.

“It’s the beginning of the run,” Joanne said. “So Anthony, our quality control manager, is trying to make sure we got the batch proportions right.” Anthony was indeed staring at the coconut batter in a silent rage.

Joanne spotted a rack full of finished Haystacks.

“You should try one,” Joanne said.

“I’m really kind of full,” I said.

“Oh come on. Don’t be a wuss.”

She handed me a Haystack. To be honest, it did not look like a haystack. It looked more like a shrimp, though I will say that the thick shreds of coconut did suggest a certain Monetinspired haylike consistency. I popped the thing into my mouth, pretended to chew, and did one of those TV-commercial smiles.

Joanne said, “Good, huh? I love how buttery they are.”

I watched Joanne bite into a haystack of her own and waited for mine to dissolve. It was a long wait.

Our last stop was the fruit room, where Standard produced a chew called ABC Fruit Chomps, which were sort of like a cross between a Tootsie Roll and a Starburst. These were not in production, though the room still smelled strongly of various fruit flavorings, jugs of which sat atop a worn-looking batch roller. The factory was, in this sense, sort of like a giant game of Clue. Each room had its own name and its own potentially lethal weapon. (It was
Anthony
in the
Coconut Room
with the
Nut Applicator
.)

Joanne led me through the warehouse, gingerly stepping over palettes strewn on the ground. She seemed to know everyone in the factory and, more astonishing, they all seemed delighted to see her. I myself liked Joanne, despite the fact that she had, more or less, force-fed me coconut. She had a firm grasp on the function of the basic factory machinery and used words such as
gunky
and
wuss
. The only dispute we got into was over how many Goo Goos I should take home with me. She felt I should take three boxes of six. I argued for two. “You can give them to the flight attendants on the plane,” she said, pressing the third box on me.

“You’re a
bad
person,” I said.

“I
am
a bad person,” she said coyly.

“You’re suggesting that I bribe the flight attendants.”

“I’m doing no such thing.”

Her office was overflowing with promotional materials, so we settled into the conference room. I had noticed, on the way back, a big in-store display featuring a pile of candy bars I had never heard of before. These were brightly wrapped bars with generic sounding names which (somewhat predictably) Joanne asked me not to divulge.

Joanne explained that these were knockoffs of brand-name bars that Standard manufactured for a dollar store chain, which, in turn, sold them four for a dollar. Joanne assured me that these bars were often just as good as the brand-name products they mimicked. Having tried half a dozen of these bars, I must vigorously dissent. The Snickers rip-off, for instance, contained a mere smattering of peanuts and a thin band of caramel. Most of the bar was composed of a sickly sweet nougat that exuded a queer chemical aftertaste. Indeed, most of the bars suffered from the same unfortunate preponderance of corn syrup (as opposed to sugar) and dearth of chocolate. They were fascinating to sample, however, because they illustrated just how particular our taste in candy bars is. Although we rarely give it any conscious thought, we are acutely aware of just how many peanuts a Snickers should have, how thick the chocolate coating should be, what flavor the nougat ought to exude. And any deviations from this formula are glaring. Our taste buds are a finely calibrated in strument. The same was true of the ABC Fruit Chomps. They tasted funny. But they tasted funny because my palette has come to define Starbursts as the standard of normalcy when it comes to fruit chews.

I asked Joanne, point-blank, if Standard could survive without the contract work. She shook her head. Goo Goos had a nice mystique. They were a solid nostalgia item, and they did make some money, but not enough to keep the business going. Like officials at other smaller candy companies, Joanne lived in fear of a price war between the Big Three. She had already seen several regional candy companies go under, including Brock of Chattanooga, where she got her start.

Slotting fees were another issue. Standard generally couldn’t afford to pay them, which had limited Goo Goo distribution to a variety of smaller grocery chains and alternative venues such as Dollar General and Cracker Barrel. They had no regular presence in Wal-Mart, the industry giant. And there was little chance, Joanne conceded, that they would ever expand north, beyond their core market. This was sad. It was sad to see a distinguished old company, with a rich history and a sensational (if sloppy) candy bar, reduced to cranking out diet bars and off-brands. But they didn’t have the money to expand the market for Goo Goos. This was the bottom line.

Before the mood could turn too lachrymose, Joanne asked me if I wanted to meet Jimmy Spradley, the president of the company. I didn’t really want to meet Jimmy Spradley, but I figured it would be best if I said yes, so I did and Joanne led me to a large office just beyond the lobby. Jimmy was on the phone. His hair was slicked back and he was wearing a suit that looked like it cost more than my entire wardrobe. He took one look at me, in my wrinkled oxford and khakis, and squinted. His expression conveyed the basic message:
This
is a journalist? I felt a little embarrassed on Joanne’s behalf. It was the sort of moment that made me wish (momentarily) that I was a billionaire.

Joanne offered to drive me to the airport, but only after loading me down with Goo Goos and a pecan log she insisted would rock my world.

And I did, in fact, attempt to give away one of my boxes of Goo Goo Clusters to the flight attendants on my trip back. I waited until after they’d come by with beverage service, then snagged the friendliest looking of the crew, an older woman with a tired looking fusillade of auburn hair.

She listened to my spiel with a vacant smile. “Goo Goo whats?” she said finally.

“Clusters,” I said. “Goo Goo Clusters. They’re like the official candy bar of the South.”

“Is that so?”

“They’re really good.” I pulled out the box from my carryon bag and directed her gaze to the sumptuous looking photo.

“There’s no more room in first class,” she said.

“I don’t want to move into first class,” I said. “I just thought you guys, like the rest of the crew, might want a treat.”

“A treat?” she said.

“Right.”

“Oh, I’d like that, honey. I really would. But we’re not allowed to accept gifts from passengers. They’re really strict on that since 9/11.”

FREAK RETENTIVE

While I have long been one to harbor emergency candy stashes, the infusion of Goo Goos left me with something more on the scale of a bomb shelter supply. This was an indisputably wonderful development, but gazing upon the entirety, which covered my kitchen table, had the curious effect of launching me backwards, into my childhood. As I have implied, I was something of a candy hoarder back then.

I can still remember my brother Dave establishing a candy collection in the top drawer of his dresser, which included a shoelace-thin variety of red licorice that came in a sort of spool, and several sticks of Big Buddy gum. Although I do recall contributing a significant portion of my life savings toward these purchases, I do not recall actually eating any of the candy. (In the spirit of historical verification, I recently broached this topic with Dave, who claimed “not to remember” what I was talking about, and further advised that I “move on.”)

Nonetheless, my tendency toward hoarding was, as I see it now, an outgrowth of such dynamics. It was not that our parents deprived us of sweets, but that the hallmark of our brotherhood was, to a larger extent than any of us would like to admit, emotional withholding. Simply put: it was verboten to express affection for one another, to praise or to hug. We didn’t even like to laugh at each other’s jokes. Instead, we communicated through boyish, and often brutal, antagonisms. Because I felt deprived of love, I hoarded my one dependable source of self-love, which was candy.

My brothers mocked me incessantly for this—
tightwad
being the favored sobriquet—and I understood that these tendencies were shameful. I couldn’t help myself, though. I remember, as a teenager, ordering a pizza with my own money and, in a fit of stoned stinginess, hiding a couple of slices under the blanket at the foot of my bed. I forgot about these slices almost immediately. It was only two weeks later, when my room began to reek of rancid mozzarella, that I recalled what I’d done. Instant karma.

As an adult, I’ve worked hard not to be a tightwad. I shower my friends with boxes of candy. I try not to quibble over tabs. But the old instincts die hard. Occasionally, when I split a dessert with someone, I can feel myself gauging their consumption, figuring if I’ve gotten what I deserve. And I’m never quite sure that my generosity is genuine, and not, in some way, compensatory. What I mean to suggest here is that the primal pleasures of candy tend to elicit primal impulses. For those of us who grew up in a state of emotional or material want, the freak retentive lurks below all our selfless gestures.

I feel compelled to note the reaction of my friend Eve when I brought her a Goo Goo from Nashville: She launched into a story about how her father used to order Terry’s chocolates from a sweets shop in his native Ireland. He kept these in his bedroom and dispersed them only reluctantly to his three children. Eve’s mother later confirmed this account and added that she, herself, was kept on a strict ration. She even remembered finding a moldy box of Terry’s on top of the armoire, where her husband had hidden them years earlier. Curiously, Eve is married to Evan, the Pop Rocks black marketeer who uses his spit to bore the center from Whoppers. They have two radioactively cute children, Milo and Theodora, both of whom were huge fans of the Goo Goo (or at least very much enjoyed rubbing the melted chocolate on their cheeks) and both of whom will, I suspect, require years of therapy down the line.

8

IN THE BELLY OF THE FREAK

Long before I began to visit actual candy factories, I harbored elaborate fantasies about visiting candy factories. The earliest of these involved a vague plan to track down the company that had produced (and ceased producing) the epic Caravelle. I assumed the operation was located in northern California, where I had grown up, and that it was run by a kindly old gentleman named Guipetto with whom I could discuss my allegiance to the Caravelle, the truly special nature of that bar, and that he would be so moved by my account that he would tear up and nod and say, “You’re right, dear boy. Caravelle is the best bar we ever produced. I’ve always known that. But the board of directors told me it wasn’t making enough money. Well, damn those vulgarians all to hell! We’re going to reintroduce the Caravelle!” Then he would lean over his desk and press a button on his intercom and bark: “Miss Swanson! Get in here. I need to dictate a memo. Pronto!”

This was my fantasy. In my fantasy, Mr. Guipetto said
pronto
.

As my knowledge of the candy landscape became a bit more refined, I shifted to a somewhat less crazy plan: I would embark on a cross-country Candy Fellowship. The idea was that someone (a charitable foundation underwritten by the American Dental Association perhaps) would pay for me to take a coastto-coast trip with stops at every candy company along the way.

This was clearly ridiculous. At the same time, it had become obvious that trying to visit factories one at a time, then returning to Boston, was even more ridiculous. So I laid plans for a final assault on the chocolate underbelly of America.

My criteria were pretty exhaustive:

1. Does the company manufacture a regional candy bar?

2. Will they let me in?

I contacted half a dozen companies, four of which showed the poor judgment to extend me an invitation. These were, in order of appearance:

–

Palmer Candy of Sioux City, Iowa (Twin Bing)

–

Sifers Valomilk of Merriam, Kansas (Valomilk)

–

Idaho Candy Company of Boise, Idaho (Idaho Spud)

– Annabelle Candy of Hayward, California (Big Hunk, Rocky Road, Abba-Zaba)

The itinerary ran like so: On Monday, I was to take a 6
A.M.
flight out of Boston to Milwaukee, then on to Omaha. From Omaha, I would have to find my way up to Sioux City, Iowa, then back down to Kansas City. On Tuesday, I would fly from Kansas City to Boise, via Denver. On Wednesday, I would fly from Boise to San Francisco, spend Thursday in Hayward, then catch the red-eye back to Boston, via Chicago’s Midway Airport, in time to get myself to the class I was teaching at Boston College on Friday at noon. To save money, I had purchased plane tickets from a fast-talking Indian woman named Shirley, who had managed to book me (at a total cost of $992) on four different airlines, none of which I recognized. A couple of the connecting flights had a perilous half-hour layover, an arrangement that, as Shirley explained in her courteousthough-severe accent, could not be avoided.

Why did I take this trip? There are obvious answers: the sense of adventure, the free candy, the camaraderie. I hoped to seek out other purebred candyfreaks, men and women who still made bars the old way, in small factories, and who did so not primarily for profit but out of an authentic passion for candy bars.

This all sounds fabulous. But it was only a part of the truth. The whole truth would have to include the fact that a depression had been building inside me for some months. My journey began in early November and by this time there was a good deal of November in my heart. I mean by this that my life had taken on a gradual aspect of grayness, matched by the clouds which hovered outside my windows and dispelled a wearying rain. The ancient sorrows had resurfaced—the loneliness, the creeping sense of failure—and I felt doomed by the oncoming winter, trapped in the clutter of my apartment, frantic to escape. So I allowed myself to hope, as I had in childhood, that the pleasures of candy would help me beat a path from my despair.

On the eve of my departure I discovered, in the course of packing, at midnight, that I had lost my driver’s license. I spent the next four hours ransacking my apartment. If you had had the ill fortune to be walking past my house at 4
A.M
., you would have encountered a curious sight: a thin, anguishedlooking man hunched inside a battered Toyota Tercel, lighting matches one by one, in a hopeless final attempt to locate his license. This was me, shivering in my bathrobe and weeping a little.

THE UNSTOPPABLE FREAK ENERGY OF MR. MARTY PALMER

The irony of the situation is that I lost my driver’s license at the Arlex Driving School, where I had come for an all-day driver retraining course at the behest of the Registry of Motor Vehicles. The alternative was to surrender my license and go to jail. But that’s another story. The point is that I arrived in Omaha, after a lovely sunrise layover in Milwaukee, with two hours of sleep under my belt and no clear idea of how I was supposed to reach Sioux City, 100 miles north. I’d been able to board my flights with a passport. But no one was going to rent me a car without a license. I spent fifteen minutes loitering around the rental car desks, asking various terrified midwesterners if they were heading to Sioux City. They were not.

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend:

EPPLY
WORLD’S CLEANEST AIRPORT
OMAHA, NE

God bless our relentless idiotic optimism.

What did I do? I found an airport travel agent who informed me that there was a shuttle to Sioux City. My driver was a man named Bill who looked a great deal like Phil Donahue—the same big square face and snowy helmet of hair—if you can imagine Phil Donahue in a state of perpetual road rage. Bill had a voice like a coffee grinder. He had served in the military since Vietnam. When I asked him in what capacity, he responded, “Let’s just say I was defending the interests of our country, alright?”

Oh, alright.

We bombed north up I-29, the cruise control set to 77 miles per hour. It was a bright, cold day and the sun beat down on fields of hacked cornstalks. “Feed corn,” Bill said. “That’s most of the business around here. It’s all subsidized. You also got some pork futures. Those are pig farms. Only they don’t like to say pig farms. It sounds degrading.”

As we approached Sioux City, a giant refinery rose up on the right. This was Morrell, the meat company. The slaughtering, Bill informed me, was done at night. He often made late runs to the airport and assured me that the stench was overpowering, “a urine/fecal type stench.”

It occurred to me that Bill wasn’t necessarily what the chamber of commerce had in mind when it came to promoting the greater west Iowa basin. Then again, I had dated a woman from Sioux City and she made a great point of noting that the acronym for the Sioux City airport is SUX. It seemed to be that kind of place—prone to self-denigration.

Palmer Candy was located in a squat, brown brick warehouse on the western fringe of downtown. Marty Palmer himself met me at the door. He looked like an anchorman, tall, athletic, excellent teeth, and he was superfriendly in that guileless midwestern fashion that always makes me feel guilty for thinking such lousy things about the world. Marty had a total cando attitude and no apparent neuroses and I didn’t like him so much as I wanted, instantly, to
be
him. He was also, at 45, about 20 years older than he looked. (I found this to be a consistent attribute among the folks I visited; working with candy appeared to keep them preternaturally young.)

“I think they’re doing the Twin Bings right now,” Marty said. “So why don’t we head into the factory and take a look?”

It is difficult to explain a Twin Bing to those who’ve never eaten one, because they are so spectacularly unlike other bars. Imagine, if you will, two brown lumps, about the size of golf balls, roughly textured, and stuck to one another like Siamese twins. The lumps are composed of crushed peanuts and a chocolate compound. Inside each of the lumps is a bright pink, cherry-flavored filling.

The filling, Marty explained, was actually a combination of two ingredients: nougat and fondant. Nougat, which contains egg whites, is fluffy. Fondant is a heavier, taffylike substance composed of sugar, corn syrup, and water. Together, they compose a cream. Marty made this quite clear as he led me into the brightly lit Cream Headquarters: I was to refer to the center of a Twin Bing as a
cream
.

He pointed to a circular steel table about two feet off the ground. “This is called a ball beater. It’s where we prepare our fondant.” The ball beater was not one of your more sophisticated machines. It had a set of giant plows that went round and round at about two miles per hour, so that, technically, it didn’t really
beat
the fondant so much as shove it around. Eventually the fondant, which began as a viscous fluid, began to crystallize and thicken. At this point, a young guy hunched over the beater and pulled off hunks with his bare hands. Because the fondant was so sticky, he kept having to dip his hands in a pail of water. From a distance, he appeared to be heaving fish from a giant frying pan. Across the way, an industrial mixer was whipping up a batch of nougat. The two ingredients were blended in a giant kettle, along with the flavor and coloring. The result, a bright pink syrup, was then loaded into a depositor and squirted into molds. Marty and I stood watching a batch of cream centers being flipped from their molds and dropped into small white buckets, which were carried up an elevator and zipped into the next room.

Overseeing all this was a friendly older gentleman with a giant whisk in his hand. This was Paul, the Cream Center Manager. He had been working at Palmer from the time he was 18 years old. He was now 75. “I’ve hired five or six guys who were hoping to take over as manager, but Paul keeps going strong,” Marty said.

Paul smiled shyly. “Well, everyone needs a little exercise,” he said.

In the next room, a thousand cream centers had been piled into a glorious pink mountain. The centers, which looked like supersized gumdrops, were being directed onto a conveyor belt and carried under a curtain of chocolate coating. Next to this assembly line were two rows of women at workstations. Each woman had a stainless steel slab in front of her, shaped like a school desk. On these desks were two things: several dozen finished centers, now sheathed in a thin brown coat of chocolate, and a pile of chunky brown—well, what was it?

“That’s called hash,” Marty said. “It’s a combination of crushed peanuts and chocolate compound.”

These women (the Bingettes?) each held ice cream scoopers, which they plunged into the hash with one hand while, with the other, they pressed a center into the middle of the scoop. This caused an overflow of hash, which they smoothed down with a single, elegant backhand swipe. It was this swipe that covered over the cream center and created the flat bottom of the bar. The entire process took about two seconds. The finished Bing was then plopped onto a slowly moving assembly line. Another Bing was quickly set beside the first, close enough that they would stick together after being cooled.

“As far as we know, we’re the largest handmade candy bar left in America,” Marty said. “I know it’s ridiculous, but there’s really no other way to do it. Hash is very hard to work with, because it doesn’t really flow. You can’t really extrude it. You can’t run it through an enrober. You have to handle it by hand. But that’s alright, because we’re having a good time using our hands.” He looked up cheerily, as if he expected his workers to sing out their accord in unison. But these women were grim and otherwise absorbed. Their white smocks and blue rubber gloves were stained brownish red with hash, like field surgeons fresh from the front.

Marty’s feelings about the Bing ran deep and sentimental. It was the most direct link to his legacy. The bar was introduced by his great-grandfather William Palmer in 1923, during the height of the candy bar craze. Of the original flavors (vanilla, maple, pineapple, and cherry) only cherry proved popular enough to survive. “We use the same wrapper my great-grandfather did,” Marty explained, as we watched the Bings emerge from the cooling tunnel. “The Bing is the one thing we never mess with.”

This was not entirely true. A couple of years ago, Marty introduced a Peanut Bing. But the combination of the peanuts in the hash and the peanut center “was just too much peanut for people,” so Marty looked for another flavor. The result was the Crispy Bing, which features crisped rice around a peanut-flavored caramel cream center.

It is worth asking, at this point, how the Twin Bing actually tastes. The answer here is somewhat complicated. I found the bar disappointing initially. The compound had a waxy feel; it lacked the inimitable kick of real chocolate, the richness of the cocoa butter. The hash wasn’t sweet enough. The whole crushed-peanut thing was weird—I was used to full or half nuts myself, and had come to assume the pleasure of grinding them up with my teeth. The cream center was too sweet, and its consistency was disorienting: heavier than a nougat, but chewier than a cream. This is to say nothing of the bar’s appearance. And here I think it might be best to quote a friend of mine’s nine-year-old son, who took one look at the Twin Bing and said, “What are those, gorilla balls?”

What I can’t quite explain is how the bar managed to beguile me. It was sort of like that girl at the party who’s so strange looking you can’t stop thinking about her, until you realize that, despite all indications of good sense, you sort of dig her. This is what happened with me and the Bing. I ate a second bar purely to confirm my initial distaste. But after the third bar, and the fourth, there was no such excuse. I had begun to relish (secretly) the salty zest of the peanuts, the sugary bite of the cream center, which called to mind cherry bubble gum. In the end, what charmed me about the Bing was the melding of fruit and nuts, which is so rare among mass-produced candy bars. (I had high hopes for the Crispy Bing, because the bar bore an obvious similarity to the Caravelle. But the crisped rice hash lacked the desired snap, and the chocolate compound, without the rescuing bouquet of the peanuts, tasted like, well, compound.)