The impending demise of the Mars chocolate factory is a bittersweet reminder of a forgotten chapter in Chicago history.
Built on the West Side by the candy magnet Frank Mars, the structure’s Spanish Renaissance architecture belies its purpose. “A casual passerby who didn’t know what it was probably would think it a fashionable club or some important institution — never a factory,” a Tribune reporter noted in 1953.
In fact, for almost a century, it has churned out the Milky Way bars that made Mars wealthy and brought fame to his adopted hometown. His initial success came with finding a way to infuse chocolate with the taste of a malted milkshake, a popular soda fountain drink.
He chose Chicago as the epicenter of his candy bar empire for the same reason as other industrial moguls: a railroad network that could link his factory with customers, coast to coast.
Those attributes led a number of candy operations to locate in the city, and In 1941, a federal agency bestowed upon Chicago the title of “Candy Capital of the United States.” The award was explained with an algorithm that only a bureaucrat could formulate.
“If all the candy made in Chicago in one year were packed in one-pound boxes and these boxes were used as bricks to pave a street 55 feet wide, this street would extend 1,026 miles,” the Works Project Administration reported in the pamphlet “Chicago’s Candy Kettles.”
In a more sober moment, its authors noted that Chicago produced a third of the nation’s candy. An effort by a cooperative of writers left unemployed by the Great Depression, the study traced the city’s sweet-tooth industry to its humble origins:
“Many Chicago candy factories began as little kettles on blackened kitchen stoves.”
The first was established by John Muhr on South Water Street in 1837. Many of the mom-and-pop operations that followed were, in fact, run by women. A mother could mix chocolate and sugar in a pan while keeping an eye on her children.
Around 1909, with her husband out of work, Ora Snyder made a batch of candy and sold it to a school store. By 1941, she had 22 candy stores and a seven-story factory at 119 N. Wabash Ave.
“The Snyder workers, whether they are making giant patties or candy pies, dipping chocolates, or slicing candied lemon and orange peels, present to observers a scene of industry not far removed from Mrs. Snyder’s own first production for a school store,” the authors of “Chicago’s Candy Kettles” noted.
Even so, the candy industry was being stirred up by an assembly line of machines that could make chocolate bars. It was one of the mechanical wonders that Germany brought to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
“In working chocolate by this machine the highly prized melting character of the chocolate is obtained and besides the taste is considerably improved,” the J.M. Lehman Co. catalog bragged of its contraption. “No other machine will obtain similar favorable results.”
“The German exhibit is an interesting and profitable place to visit,” the Tribune reported.
Indeed, Milton Hershey was transfixed. He bought the German candy-making machinery for his Pennsylvania factory and switched from producing caramels to chocolate: Hershey Bars and Hershey Kisses.
Following Hershey’s lead, Chicago’s candy-makers began “conching,” as it was called, because the prototype machine vaguely resembled a conch shell. By 1941, Chicago was producing half of all the candy bars Americans bit into, the WPA reported.
Chicago’s candy bars are quite a mouthful: Snickers, Tootsie Roll, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Three Musketeers, Oh Henry!, Bit-O-Honey, Old Nick, Two Bits, Forever Yours, Jolly Jack, PowerHouse, Tango, Amos ’n’ Andy, Milky Way, Dick Tracy, Lindy Bar, Swing Bar, Coconut Grove, Buy Jiminy and Toasted Almond Bar.
The nation was also digesting another chapter in candy history written at the Columbian Exposition. The Rueckheim brothers sold their new molasses-glazed popcorn and nuts mélange at the 1893 fair. Somehow the German immigrants managed to keep the messy concoction from coagulating into a big clump.
Three years later, Cracker Jack had become something between a craze and an epidemic, as the Tribune portrayed it.
It quoted a perhaps apocryphal salesperson: “Offering Cracker Jack for sale is like baiting a hook. When the fish bite they’re caught. When people bite Cracker Jack they, too, are caught.”
It lightheartedly wrote: “Over at the Art Institute students have enthusiastically taken up the Cracker Jack fad. They circle around a box and boldly attempt drawings from still life on a from hand-to-mouth perspective.”
The Rueckheims’ success was celebrated by a giant Cracker Jack box atop their Chicago factory. Beginning in 1912, every customer was rewarded with a prize. During the century that followed, 2.3 billion whistles, joke books and toys were tucked into Cracker Jack boxes.
William Wrigley Jr. had a similar flare for merchandising. In 1915, the Chicago chewing gum merchant mailed a sample to the 1.5 million homes listed in a U.S. phone book. He reasoned that someone who could afford a phone also had a few pennies to spend on Juicy Fruit or Wrigley Spearmint gum.
His hunch proved correct, and Wrigley’s enterprise flourished. Frank Mars’ company did even better.
Mars bought Wrigley in 2008, giving Chicagoans the willies about what might happen to Wrigley Field and the Wrigley Building. Would Mars rename them?
The real danger was revealed by an ominous footnote to the announcement of the merger’s completion. “There will be some effect on jobs, but we don’t know the full implication at this time,” a spokesman for Mars Wrigley Confectionery explained in 2016.
The candy industry had been hemorrhaging jobs for years. In 2003, Brach’s Confections closed its factory at 4656 W. Kinzie St., and about 1,000 workers making Candy Corn nibbles lost their jobs. One told the Tribune that consultants had gone through the plant organizing the removal of its machinery to Latin America.
The following year, Fannie May closed its factory at 1137 W. Jackson Blvd. The store where George DeMet invented Turtles, his patented mashup of chocolate, caramel and pecans, is long gone.
The Bunte Brothers’ massive factory at 3301 W. Franklin Blvd. was abandoned by the 1960s and demolished in 2009. The Williamson candy factory at 4701 W. Armitage Ave. was replaced by a Home Depot. Soon the sprawling Mars factory at 2019 N. Oak Park Ave. will shut its doors forever.
Yet a towering sign along the Eisenhower Expressway marking the Ferrara Pan Candy Co. factory in Forest Park, just west of Chicago, still tells motorists they’re about to enter or leave the former Candy Capital of the U.S.
Founded in Chicago’s Little Italy in 1908, the company now makes some of its candies in Mexico and Canada. But it measures itself by the same yardstick the feds employed in 1941:
“We produce roughly 800,000 feet of SweeTART Ropes daily, the equivalent of 2,700 football fields.”
Exit the expressway when it passes over the Chicago River, follow the river to the north and roll down a window. The car will be flooded with olfactory evidence of Chicago’s candy-making heritage. For 80 years, the Blommer Chocolate Co. factory at 600 W. Kinzie St. has been scenting the air for blocks around.
Even if — may the Lord forbid! — it should close, Chicago’s chocolate junkies will be able to conjure up its glory days, thanks to Ian Petchenik’s foresight.
For a time, Petchenik mapped Blommer’s chocolate fog and posted online forecasts of its reach:
“December 31, 2014. The year ends with strong winds and the cocoa smell moving swiftly along the river throughout the day. Any New Year’s celebrations east of the Blommer factory should include chocolate.”
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Mars factory’s closing is sour, not sweet, for Chicago. The city once was toasted as America’s ‘Candy Capital.’ - Chicago Tribune
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