Candyfreak Page 12

  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-fla
vored 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.)

  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.