When he was dating his future wife Athena in the late 1940s, Frank Sarris gave her a box of chocolates. He did not like the way they were wrapped. And he did not especially like the way they tasted.
'Those chocolates really did look horrible,' Sarris said. 'I thought I could easily make something better.'
He did, after a lot of trial and error.
In their early years, Frank and Athena buried burned and misshaped confectionery mistakes in their back yard. Making chocolate is an art. But, unlike more forgiving sorts of baking and cooking, it demands near scientific precision.
'We did not even want to put our mistakes in the trash,' he said. 'It is amazing that we never burned down the house with what we were doing.'
Sarris Candies began as a small operation in 1960. After four decades, three generations in the business and countless bank loans, the company now employs 300 people.
Over the past 10 years, the company's sales have grown 26 percent each year, according to Athena Simms, Frank Sarris's granddaughter, who manages marketing and advertising at the company.
'That is about what we can handle each year,' she said. 'If you grow and are not prepared for it, that is worse for a company than not growing at all.'
For nearly every child in western Pennsylvania, a pilgrimage to the large Sarris factory and store in Canonsburg may be nearly on par with going to Orlando's theme parks.
Now in his 70s, Frank Sarris, a gregarious man who greets his employees by name, still spends his days at the large factory-store-ice cream parlor that he built over four decades. Even though his son, Bill Sarris, now runs the factory, Frank Sarris has little interest in retirement.
'My doctor tells me that I should slow down and smell the roses,' he said. 'But I prefer to keep smelling chocolate.'
Sarris Candies is just one of several companies in the Pittsburgh area that have successfully carved out a niche in the chocolate business. It is something they have done by doing what the large chocolate manufacturers cannot do.
Over decades, local chocolate companies have built up cadres of fiercely loyal customers. For some people, only Sarris will do. Others insist on Carol Wayne Homemade Chocolates, a smaller company based in Ohio Township. And there are those who will only eat chocolate from Betsy Ann, founded in 1938 by Bessie Helsel, now located in West View.
In 1968, Betsy Ann was bought by Harry Paras, then a baker, and his wife Kay. Now best known for its elegant truffles, Betsy Ann has about 90 employees and operates 13 stores in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Five of the stores are franchised; the rest are owned by the company.
Small yet thriving companies like Sarris and Betsy Ann seem to be relics from another age, distinctly out of step with a culture of mass marketing that has left the country numbingly reliant on Hershey bars, Starbucks coffee shops and Budweiser.
Large conglomerates like Hershey's, Russell Stover and Nestle do in fact control the overwhelming majority of the candy and chocolate market.
Taken together, small retailers like Sarris account for roughly 5 percent of the nation's $11 billion chocolate industry, said Van Billington, president of Retail Confectioners International, a trade association based in Glenview, Ill., that represents small chocolate and candy manufacturers.
'Most of these companies are making top-quality products, and that is how they stay in business,' Billington said.
New gourmet chocolate companies have opened in the past decade. But, said Billington, 'This is not a booming area of business - it grows slowly but steadily.'
Opening a chocolate company, he said, probably takes more wherewithal than opening just any business. 'Obviously, you have to be good at making chocolate, but you also have to be good at business itself.'
As big as industry giants are, smaller independent chocolatiers inspire fierce loyalties that can last a lifetime.
'I drive to Sarris several times a year, at holidays mostly, to get candy for my kids and the people at work,' said Tracey McCarthy, a 41-year-old mother of two. Her home in Pittsburgh's Point Breeze neighborhood is about 35 miles from the Sarris store in Canonsburg.
Even on weekdays, the parking lot at the Sarris store is so crowded that the company has its own traffic control officers.
People will travel longer and pay more for homemade chocolate because it almost always is better, the people who make it say.
'Home-made chocolate and candy is always better,' said Dianne Scanlon, who runs Carol Wayne Homemade Chocolates, which was founded by her parents in 1949.
Americans do have an affinity for sweets, but less of one than many Europeans have. Per capita consumption of chocolate in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland is nearly double what it is in the United States.
And chocolate may not fit in with the country's penchant for healthy ingredients and calorie counting.
But, said Karen Paras, a co-owner of Betsy Ann Chocolates, 'If you are going to eat something, it really should be worth the calories.'
Companies like Betsy Ann and Sarris continue to thrive in an era of conglomeration because of what they will do. Large companies do not, after all, make 25-pound Easter Bunnies.
'Smaller chocolate and candy companies are far more willing to produce innovative products that may not get distributed across the United States,' said Susan Smith, a spokesperson for the National Confectioners Association in Vienna, Va.
What sells in one part of the country may not sell especially well elsewhere. Pittsburgh, the city's chocolatiers say, is a dark chocolate town. The mix used in Dallas or San Francisco is no doubt different.
West of the Mississippi River, most of the chocolate sold is milk chocolate. In the Northeast, dark chocolates are more popular. Some cities have exotic local concoctions, like the orange chocolate that has been made for decades in Buffalo, N.Y.
| | Area candy manufacturers | Sarris Candies - Canonsburg, 300 employees
Betsy Ann Chocolates - West View, 90
Dorothy's Candies - White Oak, 20
Carol Wayne Homemade Chocolates - Ohio Township, 13
Penhurst Candy Co - Churchill, 12
Esther's Sweet Shop - Pittsburgh, 11
Pflueger Candy Co. - Butler, 7
Bolan's Chocolates - Pittsburgh, 5
Wagner's Candy - Finleyville, 3 |
|
Here, local chocolate manufacturers each have their brands. And each company has its own image and specialties.
Sarris makes chocolates for fund-raising drives for schools, Little League teams and local churches. Sarris chocolate is also sold in Rite Aid, Shop & Save, some Giant Eagle stores and at Kuhn's supermarkets.
Betsy Ann caters more to large corporations. The company, whose corporate clients include Verizon and Nike, has a somewhat more elegant image.
Some say Betsy Ann's truffles are unrivaled, at least locally. The company was commissioned to make a giant truffle for Luciano Pavorotti's 59th birthday, when he was performing in Pittsburgh.
For decades, Betsy Ann sold wholesale. The company's chocolate was sold in Pittsburgh's Joseph Horne Co., several department stores in New York and in Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott department store.
By 1980, Betsy Ann, which still uses the recipes of its original owner, decided that selling wholesale was not enough. The company had almost no name recognition, and department store sales were slumping.
'The Betsy Ann name was not on anything we made, and that really became a liability,' said Karen Paras, the company's co-owner. When Betsy Ann first opened stores in 1980, the stores looked like mom and pop operations, she said.
But by the late 1980s, Jim Paras, then the owner's son and a business student at Robert Morris College, decided to change the company's image. Parras, along with business associate Harry Saenz, remodeled the stores and gave them what the company describes as 'a colonial Williamsburg appearance,' a mix of dark wood cabinets and soft pink curtains.
'The look of the stores is distinctive and has helped give the company a real identity,' Karen Paras said.
No matter what the size of chocolate company, all thrive from mail orders. And it is cheaper and more efficient with the Internet.
'People like to surf around on the Web at night,' said Diane Scanlon, who with her two children runs Carol Wayne out of the Ohio Township home where she grew up.
Her customers maybe onetime Pittsburgh residents who cannot find their favorite candy in Florida or California.
'We used to send most mail orders to people who were relatively close to this area,' Scanlon said. 'Not anymore.'
Many phone orders may be from first-timers.
'We have even gotten orders from Germany,' said Betsy Ann's Karen Paras.
More than 50 years after it was started, Carol Wayne is still very much a family affair. Scanlon's daughter Beth runs the three Carol Wayne stores; her son Wayne Scanlon starts making chocolate at 7 a.m. each day.
Carol Wayne specialties include fruit and nut eggs, meltaways and cordials.
Carol Wayne was started by Scanlon's parents Ralph and Mae Groetzinger in 1949. Ralph Groetzinger, a traveling manufacturing instrument technician whose job kept him away from home for days at a time, started the company because he was tired of travel.
For large candy and chocolate manufacturers, the most important holiday is Halloween. But, because Halloween candies are traditionally mass produced, the holiday is a not a bonanza for smaller companies.
At smaller companies, sales are seasonal and are focused around three holidays. Karen Paras said about 70 percent of sales at Betsy Ann are made at Christmas, Valentine's Day and Easter. Not much chocolate is sold in summer months.
What makes the chocolate business particularly frenetic during the big three holidays is that customers often do not plan.
'Everybody pretty much plans at Christmas and buys last minute at Easter,' said Scanlon, of Carol Wayne. 'So we stockpile.'
