Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (5 page)

Marshall sighed. “Fine. We can have Manny show you around.”

I
MANNY

Manny De Costa, the facilities manager at Necco, met me the next day at company headquarters on Mass Ave. He looked like a slightly puffed version of Norman Schwarzkopf: stern, firm-chinned, capable of inflicting significant damage with his bare hands, though he turned out to be the nicest man imaginable and no danger to anyone at all, unless you happened to be coated in chocolate.

The retro theme of Necco extended to the decor, which could have been generously described as Late Eisenhower. The elevator had a gold-plated dial above it, with an arrow to indicate the floor. The filing cabinets were wooden. On the wall was a poster, illustrated in the manner of a
Watchtower
magazine, which read
NECCO: THE MODERN CANDIES WITH A TRADITION OF QUALITY
. The only indication that the Korean War had, in fact, ended was the ’N Sync poster in the receptionist’s cage.

“This building’s been here since 1927, so a lot of this stuff is from quite a while ago,” Manny explained. “We don’t really throw anything out.” Manny himself had come to Necco as a shipping clerk 35 years ago. (His father had been an elevator operator.) Now, Manny oversaw six floors and 400 employees. He was dressed in a suit and tie, which he accented—for our visit to production areas—with a white gauzy shower cap that sat on his head like a collapsed soufflé.

The secret to virtually all nonchocolate candy, Manny explained, was time and temperature. The longer and higher you cooked the basic ingredients—sugar, corn syrup, starch—the harder the candy became. On the fifth floor, where Necco made taffy, they were heating the staples to 243 degrees in gigantic kettles. The taffy was then poured onto cooling wheels the size of steamrollers, which squeezed the stuff into sheets that looked like stained glass. The taffy, still a blazing 180 degrees, was cut into 67-pound batches and heaved onto cooling tables, then lugged onto mechanical pulling hooks.

The taffy, yanked to and fro by two rotating arms, gradually softened and turned opaque. At this point, the glob—looking very much like an albino python—got hoisted onto the batch roller, a pair of knobbed rotating wheels which massaged the taffy into a thin rope. The next machine chopped the rope into bite-size pieces, wrapped them in waxed paper, and sent them whizzing down a conveyor belt for packing. Manny plucked a piece off the belt and handed it to me. It was still warm.

Down on the third floor, wafer production was in full swing and I immediately experienced that overwhelming olfactory blast known as Halloween Smell; a free-floating bouquet of sugar, cocoa butter, and flavorings. The wafers required no boiling. Instead, the ingredients were pulverized in giant mixers, producing a grainy paste that looked sort of like caviar, if you can envision caviar in the neon register. The paste was rolled into thin sheets and punched into the desired shape. This punching happened very quickly. (So quickly that it occurred to me—in one of those moments of morbid speculation that besets me when I’m overstimulated—that I could have slipped my hand under one of the mechanized pistons and wound up with Necco stigmata.) At peak efficiency, a single assembly line can kick out 38,000 pounds of candy per day, or 15,390,000 wafers. I am not going to tell you that this is enough wafers to stretch from the earth to the moon six times. I will say, only, that it is
a lot of fucking wafers
.

Manny, who displayed an endearing (if not entirely hygienic) habit of sampling the raw paste for quality with his thumb, was a lifelong fan. “We used to go to the movie theater and fling them at the screen. Actually, we only threw the ones we didn’t like. I didn’t like the purple ones, so I threw those.” Anyone familiar with the Necco flavor pantheon will commend Manny on his good taste in this matter. I myself had often pondered just what flavor purple was supposed to signify. Frankincense? Turpentine? The correct answer, as Manny noted with some dismay, was
clove
. Why anyone would wish to produce a cloveflavored candy remained obscure. (Paging MWM.)

The Necco packing process had changed very little over the years. Tubs of wafers were fed into a giant hopper and poured down a pipe from the third floor to the second, where they funneled into rows. A crew of women then pinched up a length of wafers between their two index fingers and dropped them in racks. Picture having to fill roll after roll of quarters in a faint cloud of sugared starch, and you get the idea. The racks were pushed along to a final inspector, who surveyed each package to make sure all eight colors were represented among the 38 to 40 wafers per pack. If not, she plucked out repeats and inserted missing colors. All this happened in approximately four seconds. The floor beneath this operation was a vast and dazzling fresco of broken wafers.

The big buzz around Necco was the company’s newest acquisition, the Clark Bar. With good reason. It is possible to say that you have not lived a fully actualized life unless you have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I am qualified to make this judgment because I have eaten a Clark Bar straight off the assembly line. I have eaten two.

A native of Pittsburgh, the Clark was first produced in 1917 and became one of the most popular bars of the post–World War II candy boom. It consists of a crunchy peanut filling covered in a milk chocolate coating. Most people would compare it to the Butterfinger, though it has far more peanut flavor than a Butterfinger and a softer bite. Necco itself used to produce a chocolatecovered peanut crunch known as the Bolster Bar. But everyone seemed to agree the Clark Bar was tastier. This, according to Manny, is because of the Clark’s unique production process.

Step 1: The staples were boiled into a sticky glop, cooled, and pulled to a beige, taffylike consistency.

Step 2: The filling was fed into a huge machine which flattened it and spread a layer of real peanut butter on top. A single worker, hovering over the machine with a spatula, rolled this slab into a sort of giant burrito. This step was the linchpin of the entire Clark gestalt. It ensured that the filling was striated into sediments of peanut butter and crunch. (Manny later demonstrated this to me by biting a snack-size bar lengthwise and showing me the sediments.)

Step 3: The burrito was lowered into a batch roller, where it was funneled down and came snaking out, tickertape style, to be cut into segments.

Step 4: The peanut crunch was now ready to be covered in chocolate, a process known as enrobing. Enrobing is the money shot of candy production, a sight so sensual as to seem pornographic. The conveyor belt carried the naked Clarks forward, into a curtain of chocolate, which, in spilling down, created the delicate ripples and wavelets you find atop most candy bars. It is this illusion of liquidity that I have always found so seductive; when we look at the top of a candy bar, what we see is a particular moment, the dynamism of the fluid state captured.

Step 5: The wet bars were carried into a cooling tunnel. A half hour later they emerged, 100 yards down the line, ready for packing. The entire genesis of the Clark, from raw ingredients to wrapper, took 90 minutes.

The fresh bar had a more supple consistency than storebought. The peanut butter was more redolent. The chocolate coating melted the moment it hit your tongue. “Fresh off the line is a different thing,” Manny said. “It’s like from someone’s kitchen. I eat them all day long. That’s why I’m as big as I am.”

It was precisely at this moment, watching Manny De Costa pat his stomach and laugh in a jolly vibrato while offering me a second fresh Clark Bar, that I considered asking him to adopt me. This feeling was reinforced during our brief trip to the sample shop on the first floor, where Manny and his wife—who, it turned out, worked in the sample shop and was, if this is even possible,
nicer
than Manny—foisted a shameful amount of candy onto me, which I tried (not very hard) to refuse, and which I seriously considered donating to orphans, before deciding, instead, to eat it all myself.

FEEDING THE BEAST

That was my first taste of industrial candy production. I was delirious. I called Walter Marshall and explained, as calmly as I could, that I would need to tour the Haviland factory as well. Marshall acceded, without much enthusiasm.

I arrived at the factory only to find a huge tanker truck parked out front, the kind commonly used to transport gas or heating oil. In this case, it was transporting corn syrup. The syrup was pumped into the building through an industrialsized fire hose, which was screwed into a valve in the side of the building—the corn syrup valve. It was labeled. This pleased me inordinately, as did the lobby and the stairwells and the elevator, all of which smelled like chocolate. (Is it humanly possible to dislike a facility in which the elevators smell like chocolate?)

The factory itself was on its last legs. The machines were aging. The production floors were cramped and awkwardly laid out. Plastic tarps had been hastily affixed to certain areas of the ceiling, to contain leaks. The fellow assigned to show me around, a young engineer named Eric Saborin, was unfazed by these problems. Short of something landing on his actual head, he was not going to sweat a little clutter.

The majority of the Haviland factory was composed of assembly lines, virtually all of which were dedicated to coating something in chocolate: caramel squares, raspberry jellies, coconut creams. On one floor, a machine plinked out soft kisses of chocolate, then sprinkled them with tiny white beads of sugar, to create nonpareils. Nearby, I watched row after row of peppermint disks enrobed in dark chocolate—the vaunted Haviland Thin Mints (HTM).

A few words about this ferociously underrated product: The standard HTM has a chocolate-to-mint ratio of greater than 50 percent. If, like me, you buy seconds, you can often find mutant batches in which the chocolate layers have come out even thicker. A fresh HTM has an almost liquid center and a mint flavor that is mild enough to complement the chocolate, rather than overwhelming it. Even at retail prices, one can buy a five-ounce box for a buck. In short, the HTM makes the York Peppermint Pattie its bitch.

Saborin was busy explaining to me “the volatile nature of the chocolate medium.” You couldn’t just melt chocolate down and start pouring. Oh no. It had to be prepped in special kettles, heated, cooled, then heated again, a process called tempering. A piece of chocolate that had been properly tempered had a beautiful sheen, almost like glass. “It should snap,” Saborin explained. He picked up an HTM and snapped it in two. Then, without a word of warning, he threw both halves into a trash bin.

This happened so quickly I didn’t know quite what to do. I stood there in a little cloud of disillusionment. Saborin had somehow become inured to the holiness of his work product and this struck me as a very distressing situation indeed, given that I’m someone who has been known to eat the pieces of candy found underneath my couch.

Haviland’s most intriguing area was the panning room, which consisted of two rows of squat copper urns, known as … pans. The panning technique originated in Italy, well before the rise of industrial machines. Basically, you threw a bunch of peanuts, or raisins, inside the pan, poured in a liquid sugar coating, and started spinning. The constant circular motion ensured that each piece was evenly coated.

Modern panning technology is a bit more sophisticated. At Haviland, the panning staff—covered head-to-toe in white, like the workers at a nuclear reactor—used special nozzles to spray chocolate onto the rotating morsels. They were also able to adjust cold-air vents to keep pieces from sticking together. On the day I visited, the panners were in full Easter frenzy. More than a dozen nozzles were going and the air in the panning room was permeated with chocolate vapor. I was breathing
chocolate air
.

Saborin took me into the adjoining storage room to show me the finished product: malted milk eggs. Trays of them were stacked, one atop the next, to keep the lovely speckled shells from fading in the light. Saborin reached into a bin, pulled out a purple egg, and bit it in half, so I could see the multiple layers: the malted center, the chocolate coating, the speckled candy shell, and the shellac. I doubt Saborin envisioned, back when he was getting his degree in mechanical engineering, that he would someday explain the technical intricacies of his job by biting into a malted milk egg. But he seemed perfectly happy and asked me if I wanted to go downstairs to see the chocolate bunnies.

These were, in point of fact, marshmallow bunnies covered in chocolate. They rode the conveyor belt three astride, looking nonchalant in profile, as a curtain of milk chocolate washed down onto their white fleshy pelts and enveloped them and seeped off to reveal the dimensions of their bodies in a lustrous brown. Saborin was saying something or other, involving, I think, starch. I was watching the bunnies.

Simply: I could not stop watching the bunnies, the way the light struck the wet chocolate from above, the creamy falling away of the excess into a darkened pool below, the steel machinery flecked and streaked in brown. The workers overseeing the production line didn’t seem to know what to do. I myself didn’t know what to do. I was obviously experiencing some kind of dramatic psychic event, one that bordered on the disassociative. I had fallen into what I would later come to recognize as a freaktrance, a state of involuntary rapture induced by watching candy production at close range. These trances were the result of several factors.