Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (17 page)

“Hey, take a look at this,” Dave said. He gestured to a fiftiesera box of Spuds whose fading legend read,
A 60 CENT VALUE WITH 6 BARS
! Dave flipped the box over. On the back was a set of
international recipes
: Idaho Spud Mousse in a Mold (France), Neapolitan Spud Cake (Italy), Chocolate Cream Spud Pie (Bavaria), and, of course, Idaho Spud Fondue (Switzerland).

“That’s the one we like,” Dave said.

“Seriously?” I said.

“Oh yeah. It’s really easy. You just melt six Spuds in a fondue pot. We made it last week for a dinner party.”

I didn’t know quite what to say. Dave hadn’t struck me as a fondue sort of guy. I saw him more in the bean dip milieu.

We went upstairs to Dave’s unofficial office. It had a desk with a gallon bottle of vanilla on it, but no chair. In one corner of the room was a foot-thick steel door embossed with gold leaf. This was the old company safe, which was being used as a closet.

Dave seemed totally at ease in his role as president, but he assured me it was not what he’d envisioned when he graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in accounting. Instead, he’d gone to work for EDS, Ross Perot’s old company. He found himself, at age 25, zooming up the corporate ladder. The problem was that he didn’t really want to be. So he quit. It was at this juncture that his father urged him (
urged
is probably too gentle a word) to return to Boise to run the company.

“I showed up for my first day of work in a suit and the employees were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” Dave said. “There was this one woman, Violet Brewer was her name. She’d worked for Idaho Candy for 82 years. She knew everything there was to know about the factory. Her friend told me she took one look at me and said, ‘Well, who’s going to fix the machines?’ ”

Dave’s cell phone rang. It was Greg from upstairs. The mogul was broken again. He went upstairs to inspect the situation. When he came back down, an elderly blond woman in a garish blue windbreaker was waiting for him. Dave was wearing a hairnet and there were splotches of cornstarch all over his jeans. The woman looked at him nervously. “Are you really the owner?”

“What was that about?” I asked, when she took her leave.

“She wants to sell some of our old stuff on e-Bay,” Dave said, “the old wooden candy trays and stuff. I suppose we could describe them as collector’s items. They do have the residue of candy made a century ago.” He paused. “That’s what I like about this job—the breadth of it. I used to be an accountant, costing out billion-dollar contracts. Now I have to handle everything. Marketing, production, distribution, sales. I don’t have some big staff to test-market this or that. When I want to try something new, I go ask my friends what they think. It’s very seat-of-the-pants. I was drinking beer one night with a friend and we were like, ‘Hey, what can we do?’ We came up with chocolatecovered potato chips.” (I later bought a bag of these at this little Idaho tourist shop down the street. The combination of fried starch and chocolate was unstoppable, the snap of the chips pleasingly muted by the thin coat of chocolate.)

Dave had left the coat-and-tie aspect of accounting behind, but he remained fascinated by the internal minutiae of his business. He showed me a pair of company audits from the twenties, handsome, leather-bound volumes, which he handled with elaborate care. The itemizations included a steel starch bucker ($1,100), a vacuum kettle ($1,500), and the very trays Dave was now considering selling on e-Bay (35 cents apiece). He gingerly unfolded an architectural drawing of the plant from 1925 and was about to compare this factory layout to his current setup, when he bolted upright. “Shoot,” he said. “I’m late for a parent/teacher conference.”

AMERICAN LUNCH

Before he dashed off, Dave recommended a few lunch options, including a place called the Beanery, and a Basque restaurant, whose menu included a great deal of lamb. It turned out that the Basque were some of the region’s earliest European settlers. They’d come in the 1890s to make their fortune as sheepherders. I know this because I stopped in at the chamber of commerce and read a bunch of pamphlets. I was also intrigued to learn a little more about Idaho’s leading exports. Potatoes get most of the play, but I am here to tell you that the state produces more than three-quarters of the nation’s trout, and 93 percent of its Austrian winter peas.

It was a gorgeous late autumn day, around 60 degrees; I could see why the Basque had set down roots. Boise had a spiffy new downtown plaza, with sidewalks designed to look aged and a sleek convention center. I couldn’t help but notice that there was a steady stream of people passing into and out of this convention center, so I went over to investigate. The lobby was festooned with balloons. A cheerful young woman in a bright red polo shirt walked up to me. “Welcome to Food Expo 2002!” she said. “Who are you here representing?”

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 the 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.