Candy Dish Blog

The National Retail Federation just announced the results of its annual survey, which showed a number of interesting predictions for Valentine’s Day spending. Check this out:

• On average, each person will spend $103 on the holiday.
• Spending on friends, coworkers and pets (yes, I said pets) is up while spending on significant others is down.
• Men will spend about twice as much as women will, dropping $135.35 as opposed to women’s relatively miserly $72.28.
• Candy is the second most popular Valentine’s gift, with 47.2% of people expecting to buy it, bracketed by cards (54.9%) and flowers (35.6%).

Ladies, while you are out and about buying gifts for your coworkers, don’t forget that we guys like candy and pretty things too. Let’s try to balance the Valentine’s Day spend gender disparity once and for all. Tori, Susan, Susan and Laura, I hope you are reading this. I expect some nice goodies from you on that special day.

So how much are you planning to spend? And what do you plan to buy?

Chocolate heart by Bob.Fornal.

Much has been written and filmed about The ALL CANDY (now SWEETS AND SNACKS) Expo but the show has a new role as a supporting character in a yummy new novel by Katherine Katharine Weber, True Confections.

You may remember Katharine because she visited the 2008 and 2009 Expo where she spoke with many candy industry members.

Katharine captures well the agony and ecstasy of owning and operating the family candy business, Zip’s Candies and traces the Ziplinsky family into the 4^th generation of sweet success and disappointing failures.  A telephone conversation with Katharine revealed she gleaned the essence and history of family candy making as she spoke with members of the Born, Goetze, Karl (Annabelle), Rosenberg (Promotion in Motion), Spangler and Palmer families, among others.

True Confections is a witty novel filled with flawed characters trying to make a business out of candy.  While far from a PR piece for the industry it’s clear that several generations of the Ziplinsky family quite simply love the candy business.  They love it as immigrants to the U.S, because candy is inexpensive to produce and the variety of product possibilities easily leads to innovation.  They love it through natural and manmade, personal and professional disasters.  They love it for its do-it-yourself  possibilities.  Who can’t identify with the family working day and night to come up with a new product and packaging for a trade show only to discover that they perhaps should have done a bit of consumer research before introducing it in these modern times when a single blog, review or video can spread through the internet like wildfire—destroying a product before it is ever launched.

Now here is something really interesting.  Readers have told Katharine they remember the entirely fictional “Little Sammies” candy line.  And even better, Katherine has given Zip’s Candies a fictional candy company website and narrator Alice Ziplinsky is on Facebook (sort of).

Have you read True Confections?  Tell us what you thought.

Larry McMurtry’s Book Store by MyEyeSees.

Editor’s note (4 Feb 2010 9:54 a.m.): We regret spelling Ms. Weber’s name as Katherine when the proper spelling is Katharine. The first instance was noted with a strikethrough and following instances have been corrected.

I found an article online last Thursday about Green & Black’s chocolate going to Fairtrade completely by the end of 2011. I was pretty impressed by the move and even added it to our Amplify feed. “Wow,” I thought. “Good for them.” Then I read further and saw a statistic that said the Fairtrade market has grown from £22 million in 1999 to £635 million last year. It’s a staggering growth for any business, especially when your stock and trade is helping small businesses. That’s apparently a very lucrative business to be in!

Personally, I think of Fairtrade products in the same light as organic products, since it is the same type of store that carries the most variety of each, at least in my area. However, organic products have taken a hit in the current economy while Fairtrade products are seeing growth in sales. I attribute this to the differing reasons people buy and don’t buy each.

People buy organic products for a rational reason: they have the perception of better nutrition and safety. We are talking perception here. They are also more expensive than the non-organic alternatives. And when you are buying produce, for example, and the organic apples are smaller than or identical to the non-organic alternative and you have less money in your pocket, it becomes easy to choose a non-organic product. In other words, the choice comes down to price.
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Today I read in a daily news item in NCA’s trade magazine, Candy & Snack TODAY, that coupon use is on the rise.  According to a new study by Inmar, Inc., coupon use grew 27 percent in 2009.  The increase began in October of 2008, right around the time the economy starting sliding downhill. Internet coupon distribution in 2009 grew 92 percent and redemption of Internet coupons has increased an astounding 360 percent.

This won’t surprise readers of the Candy Dish Blog since we mentioned back in October that consumers were looking for values like manufacturers’ coupons and retail store promotions when shopping for Halloween candy.

I see coupons for candy almost every Sunday in the paper.  It made me wonder if there are currently printable coupons for candy available online.  Sure enough.  Coupons.com has few offers right now for Nestle / Wonka products. Take a look and see if you can find any more.

Are you a coupon shopper? Do you regularly clip candy coupons?

I am not trying to brag here, but I have had lots of people asking me how they can have a job like mine. They want to know how they can work in the candy central hub of sweetness activity, get to sample the latest, greatest candies, ride oompa loompas through the office and generally work with great people, fun stuff and in a positive atmosphere and a constant-growth, recession-resistant industry.

That’s a great question and one I wonder at almost daily. How did I get so lucky? I get to use my training as a writer and follow my dreams as a photographer and work in a wonderful industry with interesting people. The flowchart here explains the journey to success pretty well, I think. I first wrote about this when talking about photography as a business but I think it holds pretty well for any industry.

If you are still reading and curious, I got my job pretty much the same way everyone gets a really great job – by a combination of being good at something, knowing the right people, plain old dumb luck and then the secret sauce. Let’s look at these elements more closely:

• Be good at something. If you aren’t good at the primary skills you need for a particular job, you might want to back up and retool. Being good at something isn’t enough, though. You also have to let people know that you are good at it. There is a psychological principle that if people hear a statement over and over, they will eventually believe it or at least accept it as common knowledge. Promote yourself and all the good things you do. In my case, I wrote for various blogs and had already established myself as a writer and photographer and know something about social media. Bingo.
• Know the right people. Most jobs come from some sort of personal interaction or social network. That’s right – social networking is best done face-to-face. Talk to people, ask them about themselves, listen and have a conversation. Don’t know the right people? Find the person you want to emulate in your career and ask him/her for a meeting over lunch to discuss what it takes to be successful in that industry. Nobody turns down a free lunch and an opportunity to talk about themselves. In my case, I met Susan through her then-boyfriend and now-husband Don, whom I had met as a colleague and fellow writer a couple years before.
• Plain old dumb luck. Sometimes landing that peach of a job happens because you are in the right place at the right time. There’s no planning for this sort of thing but you can increase the chances of it happening by surrounding yourself with the right people and letting them know, in a polite way, that you are good at something. In my case, dumb luck came from mentioning to Don that I was looking for a new job, so he put me in touch with his girlfriend, who was looking for someone like me and hired me, and Don and Susan eventually got married, so that really was a great hiring decision on her part.
• The secret sauce. This is the mystery ingredient in any sandwich that is worth a darn. What makes it taste so good? The secret sauce. What is it? I dunno. In the case of finding or keeping a job, the secret sauce is what gels everything together and makes it work. It’s a quantity you cannot specifically enumerate other than to say that it works. It’s usually something like a chemical reaction between different personalities in certain environments. It’s the thing that creates synergy. No other way to describe it, unfortunately, and no way to predict whether it will be there. It can be fostered but not created, found but not completely understood.

The real answer to your question, though, is that you cannot have my job because it is occupied and I have an army of oompa loompas to defend me should you try to get me to vacate my post. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on all this, and if you want to buy me lunch to talk about getting a job like mine, I will certainly let you ride an oompa loompa while en route to a nearby restaurant. The little guys can’t hold out forever, unfortunately.

This week on Candy Dish Blog we are going to look at careers in the candy industry. It’s a tough time to be looking for jobs, but if you are interested in adding one more job search site to your bookmarks, check out the Confectionery Industry Job Site.

By 2008 numbers, the World Bank estimates that China has about 1.3 billion people, about 20% of the world’s population. That makes China the most populous country on the globe, closely followed by India. However, despite having 20% of the world’s population and a quickly growing economy, China is responsible for only two percent of world chocolate sales.

This number is growing, albeit slowly, and the disparity is quite striking. What could be the big barrier to chocolate imports in such a large country? Kris Eddy of The Motley Fool recently asked a related question and a commenter explained that one big barrier is that chocolate has been used in China for quite a while as a way to cover the bitter taste of various medicines, including cures for intestinal parasites. Talk about taste aversion.

Could this negative association be the whole story? I suspect that is a large part of it but that another aspect is China’s unique economy, which is growing yet very protected, with built-in barriers to foreign trade. In addition, as Slate’s Daniel Gross points out, chocolate is an expensive treat, possibly too sweet for the country’s palate and contains milk, which does not sit well in a country with a high level of lactose intolerance, as China has.

Right now China is up for grabs by the chocolate industry for whichever company wants to put in the marketing dollars to promote a treat that is not very popular. It’s a huge bite to chew on, and an expensive one, but potentially very lucrative. Another barrier is that China rid the country of most foreign influences a number of years ago and only really started to open up in the 1970’s, so there have been about 35 years to bring chocolate into the country and promote it.

India, on the other hand, seen as the other big, largely untapped market, has historic and commercial connections with England dating back to the early 1600’s. Although these times were not always peaceful and certainly wrought with turmoil especially toward the end of the colonial period, the end of the Raj saw a mutual agreement of friendship when India joined the Commonwealth in 1947. It makes sense that one or more British companies would dominate India’s chocolate market simply based on this 400-year-old connection.

But China is problematic. Without a natural taste for the treat and without historic trade connections, it is almost a blank slate of opportunity but bordered by strong barriers on all sides. Are the barriers too much for  chocolate makers to overcome? I suspect a balance will be found. China will likely not readily embrace chocolate the way we have in the U.S. but chocolate manufacturers may find some inroads by marketing it as a luxury item for wealthy consumers and others who appreciate the finer things in life.

The future of the industry in China is uncertain, but one thing is for sure. Mastering the art of chocolate in China might be like breaking the roughest horse in the corral and the company that figures out the secret to this will likely profit handsomely from the payoff. If you can ride him, he’s yours. Now who is going to be the first to step up?

Map of China by GGuillaume.