Long Grove Confectionery, Long Grove, Illinois 

One of Monet’s water lilies landscapes hangs on the wall, bathed in a soft light. At first glance, it could be the original. Even a closer inspection reveals convincing, emotive brush strokes. Then someone asked, “What’s the coating on that?”

“The glaze is a candy shellac,” replied Lee Althans, executive assistant of Long Grove Confectionery Co. of Long Grove, Ill.

This is no art museum.

Althans spends plenty of time in this long earth-toned hallway leading visitors through the factory’s tour. This behind-the-scenes look unveils the evolution from basic ingredients to sophisticated candies. The floor-to-ceiling windows that border each production room invite visitors to savor some true eye candy.

Althans points out the milk chocolate-framed Monets, which serve as a delicious division between rooms. Jan Wakulinski, the company’s artist-in-residence, created the paintings from a palette of dyed chocolates.

Tasty creativity doesn’t stop there, though, for the Long Grove company. Since 1975, Long Grove Confectionery Co. owner John Mangel has made a living from innovation – but only when it counts. The silver-haired Mangel, with a firm nod, said there are some things that can never be improved.

“You can’t achieve the look and the quality making this stuff on automatic machines … ” Mangel insisted. “[At] most places, if you buy a chocolate-covered pretzel, you’ll find them all lumped together in the box. They’re not individual. That has to be done by hand. They have to put on the line by hand, they have to be separated by hand, and they have to be packed by hand.”

Mangel’s 80 full-time production workers, some of whom start their workdays at 3 a.m. to make the day’s supply of products, spend a lot of their time painting faces onto reindeer crispy pops or stirring caramel in old-fashioned copper kettles. But they are well-rewarded: Althans said chocolate mistakes are fair game.

“This bucket, right here in the middle, that’s where the mistakes go,” Althans said. “I’ve often thought I’d like to come in here at the end of the day and empty that one out!”

When Mangel whips up a batch of a new product, sometimes it’s Althans who gets the extras – she said Mangel and his employees have been experimenting with ginger-infused chocolates. As one of the few Long Grove workers who can tolerate the spice, Althans can’t refuse the boxes stacked up in the conference room.

“When I started working here, the owner never said I was going to gain 15 pounds in the first year,” she said to a group of visitors. “And I did. I think I even topped 20. … Now I have some self-discipline, but not much.”

Her admission was met with an appreciative round of laughter from this day’s tour, a group of senior citizens from Pennsylvania. Travelers passing through Chicago often stop at the confectionery, whose production tour only requires a couple of bucks and a sweet tooth. About 15,000 people stop at the confectionery each year, including families with toddlers, high school classes and those on retirement center outings. Althans said the tour seems to appeal to everyone.

A 157-foot-long mural opposite the windows depicts candy-making equipment from throughout the history of chocolate, beginning with the oversized grinders of cacao beans. Visitors can look to their right to compare more modern tumblers and coating machines to their clunky ancestors.
The first window frames the kitchen, where workers mix the creamy centers of chocolates, English toffee and caramels. Visitors can see the water-filled tables used to prepare peanut brittle. Boiling water courses under the metal table tops, keeping the sugar from crystallizing so workers have a little longer to separate and smooth the brittle. Several person-sized copper kettles whip enormous caramel batches, but a leviathan of a tumbler, used for coating popcorn, stands idle on this particular tour.

A video series, played on unobtrusive televisions just inside each window, explains how some of the equipment is used. The narrator informs visitors that Long Grove’s peanut butter extruder works with 12 centers at a time, weighing them to ensure consistency. A batch yields about 640 centers.
Althans noted that the factory uses more than one million pounds of chocolate each year, but it’s too difficult to pinpoint a one-day amount.

“We are not like an ordinary candy company,” Mangel said. “We do not run the same product like Hershey or Mars on the same line 365 days a year. We’re kind of a job-shop operation. We’ll make very small batches of high-quality stuff, and the people are never doing the same thing more than a couple days in a row.”

As the visitors file down to the next production area, the video describes the process of enrobing Long Grove’s signature Myrtle, a caramel and pecan concoction similar to its “turtle” cousin.

The narrator advises that Myrtles should sit far apart so that when they pass under the curtain of milk chocolate, they will get completely covered.

“Just imagine being drenched in chocolate,” the narrator said.

Althans explained to the crowd that the enrober also drizzles stringer marks onto each chocolate. A stringer mark is an identification symbol that tells the workers what kind of center the chocolate has.

“So the key is to know the company that you know makes the chocolate and puts those stringer marks on, then you know what’s in the chocolate,” Althans said. “No more sticking your thumb through the bottom like I used to do.”

The molding and unmolding areas, next on the tour, are real flurries of activity. Snow flurries, that is.

Several production employees shake liquid white chocolate onto half-pound Christmas trees, giving them an appealing snow-capped appearance. The plastic Christmas tree molds are one of the many designs unique to the company. If the mold requires several colors of chocolate, each layer has to be painstakingly filled and allowed to dry in order to prevent the colors from seeping into one another. Most of the molded chocolates must be hand-decorated with stripes, faces or other details.

Christmas is the busiest time of year for Long Grove, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of annual sales. Even in August, the chocolate-making elves in production are working overtime to make holiday products.

She said each piece of chocolate goes through a metal detector to make sure no foreign matter is sold to consumers. All the workers must wear cotton gloves as well, because even the warmth of their hands might soften the solid chocolate pieces, which begin to melt at 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
During the hectic fourth quarter, everyone pitches in. Althans remembers working the assembly line, which now has creams whizzing along it.

“Now, that [conveyor belt] could go fast enough to resemble the Lucy and Ethel episode,” Althans warned the crowd.

But the production workers seem unfazed by speed as they clothe chocolate-covered crispy pops in holiday garb.

“We’re getting little hats, and those have antlers on it too, and you can see how they take such care to make sure the hat doesn’t go over the little face that’s been decorated on,” Althans cooed.

The visitors gathered in the outlet store after the tour to sample and browse, and some end up buying more than they planned.

Jim and Phyllis Gray, visiting from Pennsylvania, mulled over a half-price display of saltwater taffies and pecan Myrtles.

“This has been absolutely great,” Phyllis Gray said. “We’re both chocolate lovers. We’re in our element here.”

Photo by Ross Houston