Crunch time at candy factory
NECCO plant in Revere working full bore as prime season for sweets draws closer
The mercury is flirting with 90 degrees and beach traffic is thick, but the buzz here is all about Halloween. Thousands of sweets are rolling off miles of conveyor belts these days at the New England Confectionery Co., a Revere-based candy powerhouse, where workers are racing to finish Halloween production to get ready for -- believe it or not -- Christmas.
While trick-or-treat may seem like kid stuff, this candy factory is no Willy Wonka-type operation.
Think more along the lines of a major hospital, with hundreds of workers swathed in scrubs. Gloved hands and hair nets are required. But instead of an antiseptic odor, aromas of chocolate, mint, and peanut butter alternately waft through NECCO's bowling alley-sized assembly lines. The entire operation is a delicate balance of speed, dexterity, and degrees.
''Chocolate is very temperamental," says maintenance manager Michael Guerriero.
The thermostat stays at 85 degrees Fahrenheit in the room where a conveyor belt moves thousands of mint dollops, each day, through a machine, affectionately known as the ''chocolate waterfall." The dollops are coated, then moved along in the process of becoming Thin Mints. If the temperature during this ''tempering" process varies more than a degree or two, ''blooming" occurs, creating a white, almost moldy-looking chocolate by the time it reaches consumers.
''You won't get sick," Guerriero says, ''but the whole idea is to make chocolate look nice."
Guerriero's mission is to keep the plant's 200 machines moving -- not an easy feat given that many of them are a century old and run on parts not readily found at your local hardware store. NECCO depends on the company Guerriero works for,
''The companies that made these machines don't exist anymore, so we have to get kind of creative," says Guerriero, who often relies on the circa 1908 blueprints that came with the machines to design replacement parts.
On this recent afternoon, four of the 15 machines that wrap the Peanut Butter Kisses are on the fritz and that's not a good thing. Kisses are NECCO's top seller for Halloween, followed by the company's signature candy, NECCO Wafers.
The company, started in 1847 in Boston, boasts bragging rights as the nation's oldest ''multi-line" candy manufacturer, starting with its founder's invention of the country's first candy machine, the lozenge cutter. In the ensuing 158 years, NECCO created and acquired dozens of candy lines, including: the Clark bar, Mary Jane, Sky Bars, Sweethearts Conversation Hearts, and Mighty Malts Malted Milk Balls. During that time, the company expanded to three sites, one in Woburn and two in Cambridge, including its historic plant on Massachusetts Avenue.
Then in the spring of 2003, NECCO consolidated its operations and moved north, establishing its world headquarters at its current site, in a stadium-sized facility in Revere. While many of the facility's candy lines shut down for a few weeks during slow periods, the NECCO Wafer operations run nearly round the clock.
The wafers are created from a play-dough-like substance that is poured into machines, which then squeeze the goo into long, wide sheets. Then metal arms relentlessly stamp out the wafer shapes as the conveyor belt moves underneath them. High humidity in the production area keeps the wafers from shattering before they're wrapped and shipped.
Among the plant's legions of employees -- 850 during peak periods -- the women who prepare the wafers for wrapping command a lot of respect. Seemingly effortlessly, these workers grab 40 of the poker chip-sized pieces in each hand as they pour out of the machines, and within seconds, they arrange them in a line to be wrapped -- rarely breaking or dropping any. They repeat the process, over and over, during an eight-hour shift.
''The magic is how you open your fingers," says Teresa Barbosa, a wafer wrapper for 20 years. The trick, she explains, is to relax your fingers while fanning them out to pluck the spinning wafers, as if reaching for an octave's worth of keys on a piano.
Many of the candy workers are passionate about their product.
''It's an art," says Eduardo Dutra, who supervises the room where the malted milk balls and chocolate-covered raisins are spun in giant copper kettles as the final glaze is added. Dutra, with 30 years of candy crafting under his belt, is very precise about the perfect temperature for cooling the glaze.
''I like 35 degrees," he says.
After all these decades, Dutra confesses, he still can't help himself when it comes to nibbling on the job. His weakness? The chocolate-covered raisins.
Eventually all of the candy goes through metal detectors before going out the door, to ensure no stray bolts, screws, or other foreign objects have fallen into the mix, says Guerriero. Workers -- and visitors -- are required to remove any jewelry so no shiny surprises end up in the sweets, either.
Among candy makers, Halloween is king. More sweets are sold in the weeks leading up to the holiday than any other during the year, according to the National Confectioners Association. Even with the nation's increasing concerns about obesity, sweets sales are still growing, says the NCA, at a rate of 2 percent last year.
While the industry is cranking out plenty of sugar-free, diet, and low-carb options, the old-fashioned sweet stuff is, apparently, a hard habit to kick. Just 3 percent of all the candy sales last year were those diet, guilt-free goodies.
Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.
