>> The following is a presentation of KBTC Profiles.

>> The Pacific Northwest and specifically Tacoma, it's unusual.

There is actually a lot of candy history in the city of Tacoma.

And after 100 years, there's so much evolution that's happened in the candy world.

>> One of the things that fascinates me about Tacoma's candy history is the more you learn about Tacoma's candy history, the more you understand how Tacoma is the way it is today.

A hundred years ago, there's a logging town, shipping town, going out, and then a lot of produce, you know, stuff coming in.

And he had a lot of cottage industries that sort of built up around servicing the loggers and mill workers and shippers, and that sort of thing.

Candy came about because you had lot of Scandinavian folks, lot of German folks, lot of Dutch folks coming in.

They've traditionally been very good at chocolate, candy making in general.

One of the things that was in Tacoma's advantage is very mild climate, all things considered.

So anytime during the year -- it doesn't matter if it's raining or not, but it wasn't too cold for the chocolate or candy to get brittle while it's curing, or too hot to melt.

And we also had dairy farms right nearby, so we could make the chocolate, and the immigrant population who knew how to make chocolate because they did that either in their old country or along the way.

So you had candy makers making things in their spare room in their house.

A lot of the shops were shop on the bottom, sold whatever, and everything was made upstairs or in the back room.

During the teens and '20s, he started seeing that stratification where people bought things wholesale.

You had companies that went really, really big, like Brown and Haley.

>> JC Haley and Harry Brown met at church.

JC Haley was a spice salesman and Harry Brown was a candy maker, and they were friends.

And so they started Brown and Haley in 1912.

This is the original factory that made Almond Roca.

This factory was a shoe factory that was purchased in 1917 and we moved in in 1918.

When we're producing candy, this is actually about -- there's four ways candy comes into this room and packs.

It's pretty amazing to think that, like, right where we're standing here is like 150 years old.

Like, right here, like.

This tree was used 150 years ago to build this building, and it grew for, you know, couple hundred years before that, so it's so much history, so much history in here.

The Almond Roca recipe was created in 1923.

Back then, there was definitely a division of labor between men and women in all roles, really, but in confection in particular.

The process for making Almond Roca back then was to take a 50 to 100-pound kettle and dump it out onto a table.

And so there'd be a couple of men who would do that portion of the process and then turn it into the small little toffee batons.

But those toffee batons would move down to a room, and it was the enrobing room.

There were dozens of women sitting at stations, and they would sit and they would hand-roll each piece and then hand-roll it in the almonds.

And then they would sit and cool.

And then the next group of ladies would actually wrap it in the foil, hand-wrap it.

And so we were producing, on a good day, 4,000 pieces of Almond Roca in a day.

So the export portion of the business didn't happen significantly until World War II.

We had a military contract to produce Almond Roca for our soldiers.

And somebody had the great idea to say, "What if we put the candy in an airtight tin like they do fruits and vegetables?

Would it last longer?"

And, in fact, it did, and it also protected against any kind of moisture or infestation or anything like that, so it could travel overseas.

Today, Almond Roca can be found in over 60 countries.

We ship to over 30 countries.

And as of today, we're producing 3.3 million pieces a day.

This building in Tacoma that's been here forever exports that volume of product.

We like to say we're a little company doing big things.

>> I'm Bill Johnson, and I'm the production manager and really the candy maker at Johnson Candy.

We're a third-generation candy store that's been here almost 100 years.

We're a very small business, and we make almost everything here by hand.

So my great-grandfather had a lunch counter down the street here, and at some point when my grandfather was working there, he realized people like candy a lot and decided that he could probably make candy better than the stuff that they were buying from other people, and he started making candy in the kitchen there.

We kind of figured that was around 1925, so that's really how he started.

He bought some recipes from an old Greek candy maker, and then this building opened in 1949.

We've been here ever since then.

So my grandfather, Russell, you know, he pretty much ran the business, and he hired a candy maker pretty early on, and then at some point, my father became the candy maker.

Yeah, everything's pretty much done upstairs.

I still use the old recipes we've always used, and I kind of make it pretty much exactly how my dad taught me how to make things.

And I make a lot of the centers and the fudge and caramel and stuff like that.

And it's all made on -- with old copper kettles, with machines that are all much older than I am, so, you know, a lot of them are from the real early 1900s.

You know, it's pretty rewarding being part of a small family business like this.

I think that small businesses like ours really make a community kind of what it is.

It becomes, you know, part of the fabric of the area.

You know the feeling of walking in the candy store.

I think a lot of people come in here and they're just kids, again, coming in with their parents, so that never really gets old.

So it's kind of like walking into the past in a way.

So, you know, people kind of like that, I think, so, yeah.

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