ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 14, 1995 TAG: 9512140004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LEXINGTON, N.C.
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
Ever wonder how they get the red stripes on those old-fashioned peppermint sticks?
Would you believe that candy factories employ armies of elves, who do nothing all day but sit at their workbenches and, with tiny paintbrushes, painstakingly apply evenly spaced bands of color to plain white pieces of candy?
No? Didn't think so. But it's a nice story.
The truth? Well, if the peppermint sticks in question are Red Bird brand, from the Piedmont Candy Co. down in Lexington, N.C., it isn't elves who are responsible for the stripes, but four guys named Junior, Billy, Wayne and Mike.
Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, from Sept. 1 through Dec. 22, these men are up to their elbows in candy.
Elfin artistry or no, it's a magical process to watch. |n n| The recipe for stick candy, Piedmont-fashion, is deceptively simple: water, sugar and cream of tartar.
It's the process that counts - along with strong arms and calloused hands.
Days in the candy-making room start at 6:30 a.m., when the men fire up the furnaces and start two giant copper kettles to heating. By 7 a.m., when the dozen folks in the packing room come to work, the first batch of sugar syrup is already burbling in its pot.
After 20 minutes or so, they pour the scalding liquid onto a cooling table, where it begins to congeal into a gooey yellow gel that looks more like industrial-strength glue than Christmas candy.
The sugar mixture doesn't turn white until it's been through the pulling machine, a four-armed gizmo that looks like a cross between a taffy puller and a giant bread kneader. An ounce of peppermint flavoring is added, and then the sugary mass is pulled and twisted and folded for two minutes to build air into the candy and give it its color. When it comes off the machine, it has cooled enough to form a giant, oblong peppermint lozenge.
And then, the stripes.
They look like a band of pure food coloring that somehow has been painted onto each stick, but they're actually ropes of the same sugar mixture, dyed red, that are pressed - by human, not elfin, hands - onto the surface of the white ball. That's why, even after the ball is stretched and twisted into long ropes, the pattern of stripes remains the same.
A second machine chops the ropes into 4-inch sticks that are carried by conveyor belt into the next room, where they're weighed, bagged and prepared for shipment. |n n| It sounds like a kid's paradise, but it's muscle-straining, sweat-squeezing work. The bags of sugar weigh 100 pounds, the giant ball of candy 85 pounds. The mixture in the kettle is brought to 300,F; even after it's rested on the cooling tables, it registers almost 200 degrees.
Or it would register that much, if the men used thermometers anymore. They've been living with hot candy for so long that they can just pinch, poke and prod the blob to determine when it's ready to be moved to the next stage.
Over the years, their hands have toughened up enough so they can handle the hot goo without much pain, but they're still careful to touch it only as much as necessary. Which, as it turns out, is quite a bit.
``We've been doing it so long, we could do it in our sleep,'' says Mike Clodfelter. He started working for Piedmont more than 15 years ago, when he was 16.
Clodfelter, like every other person who works at Piedmont, is covered from head to foot in corn starch. It keeps the candy from sticking to anything, and it coats the floor, the walls, the machines, the people.
``Ain't nobody left but us to do it,'' says Junior Phillips. ``We've got to learn.''
Phillips, too, donned the white Piedmont apron when he was 16. He's 23 now; he figures he'll be making candy forever. Not that there's anything wrong with his job, he says. He followed in the corn starch-speckled footsteps of his brothers, Wayne and Billy, who have worked in the production room for years. Doug Reid, the company's owner, treats them like sons. The boys work hard - they even work through meal breaks - and the Reids appreciate them, he says.
They make 5,000 pounds of candy a day and ship out about a million pounds - $1 million in sales - a year, says Chris Reid, Doug's son.
``That's about as much as you can get out of one production line,'' he says.
It would be expensive to add another production line, but they could do it. They'd have to move into a new building. They'd have to buy another pulling machine, another batch roller, two more copper kettles. If they had the capital, they could theoretically, double their production.
But it's tough to find good help, Reid says. The dozens of furniture factories that dot Lexington and environs gobble up most of the area's eligible work force. And even if the Reids could find people to hire, it would take the new employees months to learn the intricacies of the candymaking process. |n n| Doug Reid bought Piedmont in 1987 from Robert Ebelein, whose family had been making candy since 1890. Today, Doug and Chris run the company.
Piedmont is one of just a handful of candy companies that still make old-fashioned stick candy the old-fashioned way, with 100-percent sugar and plenty of human labor. Most companies that produce hard candy add corn syrup to stabilize the sugar, Reid says. That makes the process easier - more of it can be done by machine - but the finished product harder to the teeth.
Piedmont's flavors are old-fashioned, too. Peppermint. Horehound. Clove. Sassafras. Lemon. No bubble gum or strawberry-mango-passion fruit here.
Years - and years and years - ago, stick candy of the type that's made at Piedmont was all that many candy-eaters knew. None of these mile-long grocery store candy aisles back then. No sir. Just general stores and jars of penny candy sticks.
Piedmont sells most of its candy to grocery store chains and convenience marts, but general stores haven't gone by the wayside. Wertz's Country Store in downtown Roanoke has sold Red Bird candy for a decade or more, says shopkeeper Gary Craddock. It's most popular around the holidays, he says, when they sell it in gift baskets. But it sells well the rest of the year, too, with tourists and locals, old folks and yuppies.
Problem is, Chris Reid says, the most loyal customers - the oldest ones - are dying off. That's why the Reids always liked taking kids on factory tours - to show them this other kind of candy, this not-too-sweet, not-too-bad-for-you alternative to the fat-laced, nougat-filled creations on the market today.
But it got to be too much, leading all those groups of school kids through the factory, so they had to stop offering the tours. With only 20 full-time employees, they couldn't afford to devote a person to tours - especially around Christmastime, when every customer wants his order delivered yesterday.
They'll stop making candy for the holidays Dec. 22. There's just no way they could make it, pack it and ship it to stores in time for Christmas after that, Reid says.
And then life will return to some version of normalcy. They produce and sell candy year-round, but from January through the end of August, they work just 10 hours a day, four days a week.
``Everybody's tired,'' Reid says. ``I just wish Christmas would get over so we could take a break.''
LENGTH: Long : 140 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL. 1. Piedmont Candy Co. co-owner Chris Reidby CNBstencils the name of Wertz's Country Store on a shipment headed for
the store on the Roanoke City Market. 2. Phillips added red food
coloring to part of the sugar mixture, which became stripes for this
85-pound blob of candy ready to be stretched and twisted and finally
cut into single-serving pieces. 3. Busy elves: Packers Mary Rachels
(left) and Linda Hughes fill boxes. 4. Junior Phillips (right) pours
an ounce of peppermint flavoring on the candy as the pulling machine
builds air into the sugary mass. 5. A few steps later, peppermint
sticks cool (below) and harden as a conveyor belt rolls them to the
packing department. color.