Nerds candy boosts Itasca plant's fortunes
Reporters once might have been drawn to newspaper work by the printing machinery rumbling a few floors beneath their desks. For sure, I couldn't resist touring a factory. As a Chicago Sun-Times business reporter in 1984, I wrote about not only healthcare innovations like MRI scanners and PPOs, but also candy breakthroughs like the Everlasting Gobstopper. Ferrara, which now owns the Willy Wonka brands, is a PR client. Working with their team sent me back to my musty clippings and reminded me that jobs at the candy factory just seem like fun.
Making candy for pre-teens is hard even for the folks at Willy Wonka Brands to swallow.
"When kids are young they look for distinct flavors and bright colors," said Dick Gower, national sales manager at the Itasca candy plant. He grabs a Wacky Wafers tablet off the assembly line, but takes only one bite. "Sour apple flavor," Gower explains. "Too strong for an adult."
Nonetheless, the grown-ups at Willy Wonka have a keen taste for children's confections. The division of St. Louis-based Sunmark Inc. has proved it with a product called Nerds.
Introduced last year, it was 1983's fastest growing brand, and started 1984 with a bigger market share than even such industry heavyweights as Curtiss' Butterfinger or M&M/Mars' Milky Way.
"It sells like the blazes," says candy broker Howard Wirth, chairman of Wirth-Daniels Corp. in Rosemont. (Privately held Sunmark won't disclose sales figures.) Wirth calls Willy Wonka "a supoer house, very attuned to the young audience. They're very innovative people with superb packaging."
The quirky Nerds package, a split-chamber paper carton that dispenses separate flavors of the sugary Nerds nuggests, contributes to the product's strange appeal. So does the name, negative connotations and all.
On college campuses, where "nerd" has much the same meaning as "egghead," engineering students have made Nerds a cult item. Sunmark's co-opting the term won Nerds the 1984 "Great Names to Go Down in Marketing History" award from the trade magazine Adweek.
While fad items are common in the Willy Wonka catalog, Sunmark's marketing people cautiously predict that Nerds is no fad, They've capitalized on the cute, Schmoo-like charachters adorning the package for T-shirt and stuffed toy promotions, and expect to license the characters to appear on products from lunch boxes to Saturday morning cartoon shows.
"To really do it the right way you have to create a history of the Nerds character," says general manager Ron Salek, an Itasca resident. "We're working along those lines."
The foray into oddball chic continues with Fruit Runts candy, which is getting a West Coast market test, An attention-getting day-glow package comes decorated with banana, strawberry and grape gremlins. The candy itself is shaped like fruit, in vivid New Wave colors—a neat production trick. "The banana wasn't easy," Salek admits.
Willy Wonka is a character in an old English reader, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and a 1971 film, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Sunmark produced chocolate bars for Quaker Oats under the Willy Wonka name, then bought the brand and recipes when Quaker dropped the line,
Sunmark ultimately renamed its Breaker Confections unit after the character, and names from the Willy Wonka story live on in products like the Everlasting Gobstopper—a jawbreaker built in layers to change flavors over several hours. "It lasts a heckuva long time," Salek says. "Not forever."
Willy Wonka no longer has its chocolate factory, but has expanded the Itasca plant to more than 100 employees. Salek expects to build an addition to the 90,000-square-foot plant next year to expand it by one-third.
Jawbreaker and roll-candy production fills the Itasca plant with the scent of different flavorings. "It goes from cherry to fruit punch to any other flavor," Gower says. "I don't smell it anymore."
The concoctions are as much a creation of the sales force as the R&D people. "We have several brainstorming sessions a year," Salek says. "We got our marketing and design people together, and we even invite some outsiders."
The method figures in Willy Wonka's success—Nerds was a back-burner project of the company's candy makers that only caught fire when combined with the jazzy packaging and title ideas. Children taste-test the concoction before test marketing begins, and test stores are monitored for sales trends.
The creative teams often capitalize on fats, notably a few years ago with UFO candy packaged in a plastic saucer.
We're an ethical company in the trade," Salek says. "If we think it's a fad item, we tell our customers to only reorder once and be very careful after that. As a result, if we have a product that's going to be a barnstormer they'll really support it.
"We also leave a couple of markets for the end," Salek says, "so that when it stops selling we can move our stock to another town where it's a new proposition."
Willy Wonka's candy men try to lead fads rather than follow them. As domestic candy companies attemp to produce imitations of foreign Gummi Bears imports, Wonka is producing a gelatin-based candy squid with a slimy, chewy texture.
The world of children's candy is comfortable enough that they don't want to grow up into less sugary lines for adult tastes. "The energy we put into other products just doesn't get the same awards," Gower says.
