[THROUGH A CANDY-FACTORY.]
BY BARNET PHILLIPS.
To begin at the beginning of a great candy and sugar-plum factory in New York, there was one trait shown by its founder which established its reputation. The man had the same characteristics as had Josiah Wedgwood. In England one hundred years ago pottery was a rude and incomplete business. Josiah Wedgwood made it one of the most classic and elegant of the plastic arts. When Wedgwood went through his vast Burslem work-shops, and noticed a piece of his ware—say a teapot—which was not up to the mark, he took a stick, and he simply smashed it.
There was once a baker who made cakes. Occasionally there would be a failure in his batch. The raising of the dough or the baking was defective. That baker never would sell these poor cakes to his customers. He might give them away. What he said was this, "These poor cakes are not a fair equivalent for good money." In time his business prospered because his cakes were the very best. Then he took to candy-making in a small way—only molasses-candy. But what he made was so super-fine that he could hardly meet the demand. Then he made other kinds of candy, with the same success. So his business grew and grew, until to-day this enterprise founded by this baker occupies a large building with many stories in New York, and the motive power for making chocolate, candy, and sugar-plums is a 300-horse steam-engine, and 350 people are employed.
To give some idea of the quantity of the prime material, sugar, used every day in the year in this establishment, the total mass may be fairly grasped at in this way: An acre of good ground in the West Indies produces twenty tons of sugar-cane; the sweet juice expressed from the cane represents some eighteen per cent. of this.
Before the sugar is turned out by evaporation the percentage of weight is notably diminished. It takes then about three-quarters of an acre of cane to supply this factory with the sugar necessary for its daily consumption. It is not only candy and sugar-plums which this concern makes, but chocolate in quantity, and sugar enters largely into the composition of this last substance.
From top to bottom the floors of the factory are covered with tiles, and I noticed that there were people engaged in all parts of the building scrubbing and washing these tiled floors. For a candy-factory it was the least sticky or smeary place I ever saw. Absolute cleanliness and sweetness was the rule. There was a slight drift of sugar about, as in a mill where wheat is being ground, and your coat might get a little powdered, but there always was sweeping going on.
Chocolate-making I need not describe, only to state that everything was done here by machinery, for the chocolate as produced enters for a large percentage into the bonbons manufactured.
