Chapter 3

Creating Candy

KITCHEN ACCOUNTING

Carl created his first original recipe, a fluffy honey and coconut center dipped in coconut and milk chocolate, and named it aptly, Honey Ko Kos, but first he had to adapt the candy-making procedures he had learned at Brecht’s to his small operation. Any home cook who has ever attempted to produce fudge or fondant frostings or toffee knows that it is simultaneously a simple, yet risky, process. The basic ingredients of corn syrup, sugar—either beet or cane, although Carl would have used the former—and water don’t change, nor does the prime importance of the temperature to which each batch is heated. Failure quickly looms for the unwary who ignore this last fact.

With income and expenses now his sole responsibility rather than just a corporate entry on a balance sheet, Carl had to learn to work quickly and accurately in producing his confections. It was a business that many entered, and they found, to their chagrin, that the rate of failure verged on the astronomical. In 1926, The Colorado Yearbook listed seventy-two confectionary and ice cream manufacturers;²⁸ in 1928, when the yearbook separated the two industries, there were only forty-five confectioners;²⁹ by 1939–40, that number had tumbled to eighteen.³⁰ Carl must have seen some of these other entrepreneurs come and go, but from the beginning, he was an astute businessman and avoided the others’ mistakes.

Money couldn’t have been very plentiful in those early years, but Carl learned to spend his wisely, and it is said that he never bought any equipment new, taking advantage of what became available as others closed their firms. Unbelievable as it may seem, some of what he originally purchased is still found on the factory floor today. In his first few years, Carl did it all: he developed the recipes, made the candy, sold the candy and was his own office staff. For generations of Hammond family candy makers, the original formulae could be found in a small three- by five-inch ring binder that served as the bible for anyone who needed a refresher or was new to the company. “To be a small businessman you always have to make the right decisions—one slip and you are gone,” Carl once told a family member. He clearly recognized the relationship between creating a product and its profitability on the open market, and he quickly learned to capitalize on the quality of his candies. If something worked once, it could be counted on for the future. If it didn’t, he was not afraid of trying something new.

Carl’s first kitchen would have had to contain certain basic necessities. He probably started with an open hearth furnace, about three and a half feet in diameter and standing two feet off the ground. The stove had to be large for the flames to produce the high heat needed to boil the candy syrup, and he would have used a long-handled paddle, about three to four feet, to stir it in a large copper kettle. In a small candy factory like Carl’s, ordinary tools that could be purchased at a local hardware were, and still are, the implements of choice to achieve the desired result. When it came to mixing the hot, heavy syrup, axe handles were used since they were the desired length and strength. When the temperature reached around 320 degrees, depending on the type of candy he was making, Carl would have poured it onto a steel table, called a slab, to cool it. Other equipment that he would have needed were three-foot-long, one-inch-square metal bars; a series of large spatulas; one- and two-quart tin measuring pitchers; and round steel bars to flatten the candy as it cooled. The last essential piece that Carl needed was a heavy metal hook, about an inch in diameter, that ended in a point; as candy cooled and became malleable, he would throw it over the hook and pull it down until it was about two feet long. Carl had to keep re-hooking and pulling it down to make it softer and lighter, and he would generally manage this in quantities of twenty or thirty pounds at a time. As a solo practitioner in his small kitchen, Carl spent long, sweaty and hot days at work, and it is important to remember that not only was he the sole candy maker, but he was also the only dishwasher and, like everything else in his kitchen, it was a hand operation. Even today, although there are many workers at Hammond’s Candy, a visitor will still see the workers scrubbing the huge copper pots and tables. A more detailed description of how the candy is made is found later in this book, as is a glossary that describes the equipment.

Pouring sugar into the huge cooking pots requires as much brawn today as it did in Carl Sr.’s time. Photo by the author.

Adding and stirring water into the candy batch is still done using the traditional axe handle. Photo by the author.

Cooking pots and fire mixers in Hammond’s kitchen. Photo by the author.

Hammond’s Candy kitchen, where all the candy is made; note the menorah loaf in the batch roller at lower right. Photo by the author.

COUNTING COSTS

Clinton H. Scovell, who contributed articles to Candy and Ice Cream about the time Carl went into business, cautioned newcomers to the industry, “Do you know your costs?…When candies that sell from five or ten cents a pound up to forty or fifty cents are made in the same department, and often on the same machine, it is absolutely necessary that a reliable method of figuring costs be used to make sure that all these lines are profitable.” He continued:

Considering the business as a whole I find that candy is made in many comparatively small factories, as well as in the huge plants which are characteristic of other lines of industry. As a natural result, competition is very keen, and some of it not as well informed as it should be, because a man starting in business with small capital has not as much experience as a man who has accumulated and is using the large investment. A second important consideration is that most candy manufacturers are making a great variety of product…Every manufacturer must sooner or later face the problem of having reliable costs on each kind of goods that his factory produces. Much work in the line of accurate cost finding has been done in…many other industries, but as far as I know, nothing similar to the care and accuracy with which these costs are figured has been worked out by the candy manufacturers. The principal difficulty is that the candy business is considered “peculiar” and most practical candy manufacturers have not believed that modern accounting applies to them.”³¹

Unfortunately, he didn’t elaborate further on the meaning of the word “peculiar,” but his concerns about cost accounting would have been important for the neophyte. Many years later, armed with the accounting skills he had acquired in his accounting classes, Carl III attempted to improve on his grandfather’s use of index cards to document his costs. Fortunately, Carl Sr.’s practical experience prevailed over his grandson’s less realistic, intellectual approach; small businessmen like Carl don’t have time to read it, they have to do it and do it right every time.

Too much could be made of Carl’s reluctance to attend high school, since at that time only a small percentage of Americans graduated from secondary schools, and in no way did he denigrate the importance of education. It simply meant that he believed there were alternative ways to achieve learning. According to a grandson, he read Barron’s, the Dow Jones weekly newspaper widely considered to be the nation’s most influential financial journal, every day. While there is no way of knowing when he initiated this practice, it is interesting to note that the two shared a similar longevity, since that venerable magazine started in 1921.³² Carl always maintained a strong will to succeed and exercised the means to achieve his aims. The fact that Carl built a successful business in the face of all the competition from similar companies that came and went attests to his innate ability to recognize what products should be continued and what should no longer be part of his line. He clearly had an inborn sense of profit and loss, and it could be said that he earned his MBA on the job. The financial shenanigans that led to the great Wall Street crash in 1929 could be found to a much lesser degree in the dealings of small merchants and manufacturers throughout the United States, but never in Carl’s business dealings. He never incurred any debt other than regular trade terms. That he never bought anything he didn’t have the cash for was one of the pillars of his success. “Debt is death” was his frequently repeated creed.

WHOLESALE EXPANSION

As Carl became established in his neighborhood as a purveyor of fine confections, he expanded into a wholesale business and added at least one employee to free himself to expand his market. He proved to be as good a salesman as he was a confectioner, as shown in another family story. One day, a customer came in to place a wholesale order with a list he had prepared to leave with Carl. As he was about to walk out, satisfied he could get all he needed the next day, Carl stopped him with the question, “Do you have any hard mix? You should really get a couple of boxes.” The customer thought it over and agreed that he would like to increase his order and would be back the next day. That buyer probably enjoyed a good night’s sleep, but now that Carl had gotten his sale, he stayed up until three o’clock the following morning to get the mix together. In addition to an understanding of how to make his venture successful, he was just never afraid of long hours and hard work.

Carl Hammond Sr. shows off his namesake, known as Tom, about 1923. Carl T. Hammond III Family Collection.

Although the phrase “24/7” was still a term that wouldn’t be used until far into the future, it would have been an appropriate description of Carl’s typical day. In addition to his long hours at the shop, he had also become a family man: Carl Thomas “Tom” Hammond Jr. was born in 1922, and Marjorie followed in 1924. That same year, Carl and Laura’s address was listed in the annual Denver Householder’s Directory at 2103 Clay Street. The house was located on a quiet street, and it had a small front porch that could be blocked to keep Tom and his sister from falling down the steps or running into the street. Even better, it was just a short walk to Jefferson Park, an almost seven-acre area where Laura could bring the children to run around and release their energy, and it was also an ideal spot to meet other mothers and indulge in adult conversation while the youngsters found their own playmates. The Town of Highlands had drained a lake there in 1891, and for a few years after the park was established, the nationally acclaimed Sells-Floto circus used it as its winter quarters.³³ It was a little less than a mile from the house to Carl’s factory, a nice walk downhill for his morning commute, but the evening uphill trek must have felt arduous at the end of his long days.

Although every shop offers its own unique specialties, they are really variations on a theme, and candies can be divided into several general categories. Carl would have learned to make all of them as he started out—hard, caramels, chocolates, brittles, fondants and marshmallows. Like all recipes, formulations evolve, and Carl brought basic recipes and techniques from companies he worked with prior to opening Hammond’s. From his early success, it is apparent that he had an innate knack for the process since he recognized, as he later explained to one of his grandsons, that “the art of making candy is the art of controlling the crystal in the sugar.” Many years later, his son Tom put it another way after he had taken over the business and was explaining the technique: “All you do when you make candy is cool the crystals and then you control the crystallization. Agitation plus heat makes crystallization.”³⁴ Carl also never diverged from his emphasis on the importance of quality methods to maintain the best flavors. A good example of this is still used in the factory today. Water is needed to dissolve the sugar, but once that occurs, its usefulness is ended, and it has to be removed. Hammond’s still carefully cooks the water out, while larger competitors and manufacturers of cheaper products use a vacuum procedure to remove it. Carl maintained that his method resulted in a truer flavor.

CANDY CENTER OF THE WEST

By 1920, Denver had squeaked onto the list of the twenty-five largest American cities and had reached a population of 256,491.³⁵ It was considered “the distributing center of the territory lying between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast and the Canadian and Mexican borders.”³⁶ It was a time of economic upheaval but also a period in which the city recognized the importance of supporting its many smaller industries. One of its great successes was the joint exhibit of Denver wholesale confectioners, which the Industrial Bureau of the City and County of Denver sponsored.³⁷ Hammond’s Candies would have been too small to participate in this event, but the fact of the convention emphasized how many purveyors of sweets flourished at that time.

If Carl needed further proof that he had entered the right business, he had only to pick up the October 12, 1923 issue of the Denver Times with a headline that heralded “Denver Proving Candy Center of Entire West.”³⁸ The article, which once again touted the climate as being a prime reason for the industry’s success, also announced the reactivation of the celebration of Candy Day, a festivity inaugurated by the National Confectioners’ Association throughout the country. World War I had interrupted the recognition of the day, but the Colorado Confectioners’ organization was joining with the national body in awarding prizes to dealers and retail stores for the best displays of candy in their windows. Encouraging consumption of these sugary treats was certainly the order of the day, but one aspect of the event clearly indicates how attitudes have changed in the past ninety years. E.M. Cosner, the secretary of the association and owner of the company where Carl first whetted his appetite for candy making, announced that he would give a radio talk on the Reynolds broadcasting station to schoolchildren of the state and invite them to submit essays to be used in promotions. The winners would also receive prizes. But the major candy makers did not view youngsters just as unwitting or innocent customers of their products, as witnessed by Jacob Straser, who had opened his plant on Blake Street in 1920. He opined, “Youngsters are far more discriminating in their appreciation of good candy than most people concede.”³⁹ Obviously, candy manufacturers all recognized the importance of the youth market—after all, who is most likely to be seen on the street licking a lollipop or a candy cane? Today’s critics might frown on this kind of marketing to children, but most children in the 1920s had much less discretionary income to indulge at the candy store, and there were very few fat children to prompt any such outcry.