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Candy Check: What Middlebury Grabs For Treats Or To Fight The Chills

Tuesday January 22, 2008

By Ed Barna

   January is a terrible time to make dietary resolutions, with hypothermia never far away.

   Not just the cold and gloom, but also the shut-in misery of it all makes it hard to resist the temptation to add that little something extra at the checkout counter. So, going with the drift of things, we decided to ask several candy-packing Middlebury businesses what leaves the shelves and bins most expeditiously.

   This is of course grossly unfair to cookies, muffins, sticky buns, cakes, pies, and arguably even meat jerky. When Greg Wry, the proprietor of Greg’s Meat Market, was asked whether beef jerky could be considered candy in a meat store, he said “No,” and besides, there was also venison jerky, buffalo jerky, and pork jerky—a response which seemed to us to make the contrary point.

   Nevertheless, we are sticking here (so to speak) to the most concentrated sweet stuff. Just in that realm, we did uncover some surprises, and there was indeed a strong candidate (so to speak) for Middlebury’s favorite sweet.

   Sweet Surprises Down Candy Lane in East Middlebury seemed a logical place to start. Proprietor Blanca Jenne said she carries mixes as well as individual brands of candy, and two of those had proven popular.

   “Our number one seller has been our licorice bridge mix,” Jenne said. But also, there’s “The Middlebury Mix.”

   Before opening next to husband Brad Jenne’s U-Haul dealership (she also has the scrapbooking and rubber stamping store, inside which the candy store awaits) she put a survey in newspaper to find out which flavors of jelly beans people liked best. The favorites were as follows: butter popcorn, chocolate pudding, lemon drop, peach, very cherry, orange juice, blueberry, watermelon, coconut, strawberry jam, green apple, raspberry, lemon-lime, cinnamon, and cotton candy—the ingredients of the Middlebury Mix.

   Assuming it’s true that we are what we eat, these 15 flavors seem to indicate a strong taste for diversity. Maybe it’s partly the influence of a college that flies the flags of more than 50 countries at each graduation.

   Other local choices: “Almond bark. People love that.” In case you’re wondering why anyone would ingest the bark of an almond tree, chocolate is the matrix in which almonds are embedded, in a flat form that somewhat resembles bark

   Localvores who may be regretting this taste for things foreign will be glad to know Jenne also sells a lot of maple creams—which do have a chocolate coating but have maple-flavored soft stuff inside. As with the bark, it can be either milk or dark chocolate, she said.

   Dark chocolate seems to be coming on strong, and for good reason.  “Dark chocolate has ingredients that lower blood pressure and fight disease, but white chocolate and milk chocolate don’t,” says one headline at www.webmd.com.   Another says, more specifically, that
“Researchers say eating a small, 1.6 ounce bar of dark chocolate every day is good for you because it’s packed with heart-healthy flavinoids.”

   In Vermont, people seem to be combining chocolate with peanuts, which add energy and nutrients of their own. “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are our best seller,” said Greg Wry, the man behind Greg’s Meat Market. “That’s all year long,” he added.

   “One of the best sellers is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” said Marie Hayyat, who does the candy buying for the Middlebury Market & Café (also known by patrons as Sama’s, Sama being a real person rather the Market being a place you go to buy sama this and sama that). “Snickers are right up there,” she said, and “Twix, I would say.”  “A lot of people are buying dark chocolate now, too,” Hayyat said. Around Easter and Christmas especially, they sell a lot of Lake Champlain chocolate bars, she said.

   At Greg’s dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses have been recent favorites.

   At Ben Franklin, candy buyer Sandy Newell said Lindt chocolates are very popular, with those who get them saying they’re “absolutely” better than other kinds. Dark? “We have all the flavors of that one,” she said.

   Necco wafers, which were on Vermont shelves more than half a century ago, still sell well, Newell said. Tootsie rolls, Sky Bars, York patties, and the Sathers bags of candies came to her mind as local top sellers.

   Jelly beans? “We don’t carry jelly beans,” Hayyat said.

  At  Greg  “Jelly beans are a very good seller,” “especially around Easter,” but you have to buy them in 30-pound bulk boxes.  However, “we go through about 900 pounds of jelly beans every Easter. That’s a lot of jelly beans.”

   But in the end, chocolate rules. That’s true for a county Internet as well as retail business.

    Phenomenal Fudge of Shoreham, Chef, Steve Jackson said that when he goes to a show or fair, he can run out of any other flavor and still do well, “but not if I’m out of chocolate. I make 33 different varieties,” but after people get done trying something new, “it’s always chocolate.”

   And make that dark chocolate. Jackson used to have a milk chocolate flavor, but it went dark.

   Before closing, we want to add something we learned from another Middlebury retailer, whose name we promised not to reveal. If you want to sweeten the local economy, pay cash rather than using a credit card.

   It costs your local store 17-23 cents just for you to swipe the card, the person said. The card company gets about 2.5-3 percent of the total transaction. And speaking of subprime loans: some of those cards carry interest rates as high as 33 percent, the retail veteran warned.

   While credit card spenders were wishing each other Merry Christmas, that store paid $7,600 in credit card fees just for December. And that, as President Ronald Reagan might have said, is a lot of jelly beans.

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