San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chocolate waterfalls and hand-frosted flowers: How See’s Easter eggs are born
Inside 102-year-old candymaker’s South S.F. factory, holiday prep starts months in advance
The incubation period for a chocolate Easter egg at See’s Candies can be up to four days. So to prepare 4 million of them in time for Easter, which arrives early this year, on Sunday, March 31, the 102-year-old candymaker needs a head start.
For months now, workers at the company’s South San Francisco factory have been placing decorative flowers and bright pastel-colored frosting on a nearly endless stream of treats manufactured inside. On any given morning, as chilly winds blow through the Bay Area’s morning gridlock, workers have already begun making thousands of candies per hour, from vanilla buttercream with silky chocolate to dark chocolate almond bites.
While many of See’s Candies are efficiently finished in just minutes, See’s popular large eggs — some the size of a melon — are made entirely by hand. “We’re not automated and we don’t intend to be,” Pat Egan, president and CEO of See’s, said of the egg decorating process.
Chocolate eggs have been a key offering at See’s since the 1930s, Egan said, around the time the company expanded into the Bay Area, which is now its headquarters. (About half of See’s Easter candies will be produced at its other factory in Los Angeles.) Easter is still one of the company’s strongest sales periods, with sought-after products that include chocolate bunnies and ornate, 9.5ounce rocky road eggs filled with a blend of milk chocolate, walnut and marshmallow ($19). Other top-sellers include more modest, 3- and 4-ounce chocolate eggs with fillings like peanut butter, scotchmallow (See’s popular mix of sticky marshmallow and butterscotch) and nougat-like Bordeaux filling.
This is how See’s Easter eggs are born.
When See’s plant manager Bob McIntyre opens the door to the factory floor, you feel the atmosphere shift. Cool, recircu
lated office air gives way to a thick and warm mass, rich with the smell of chocolate. The factory has two 50,000-pound milk chocolate tanks that feed into the production. There are also 85,000 pounds of dark chocolate and 10,000 pounds of white chocolate. With so much buttery cacao in the air, you don’t just smell and taste it, but also feel it on your skin. Candy fillings also perfume the factory. A daily 2,000 pounds of Bordeaux filling is cut into trays 40 pounds at a time.
On a large machine upstairs at See’s, fillings like Bordeaux, vanilla chip and chocolate butter are laid out into small, 0.8ounce egg-shaped bites. A large lump of the sweet filling is placed into a machine that feeds the sugary mass through an extruder to make row after row of 21 eggs. The machine produces 17,400 pieces per hour that will end up in See’s Easter six-piece boxes ($10).
The rows march along a conveyor belt, where staff cut out any scraps from the extruded shape. A few yards later, the bits get a chocolate dip that covers the bottom before reaching a chocolate waterfall that fully enrobes them. To give the chocolate a bright sheen, it has to be tempered — heated to well past its melting point. The cascading chocolate gives each row of candy eggs a uniform layer before a team of decorators quickly places a small handmade flower on top of each piece.
The team works quickly, some reaching to the center of the line to place their flowers, while others place theirs on eggs near the edges. Next, the egg rows reach a cooling area that hardens the molten chocolate into a shell, surrounding the candy inside and locking the flower into place. Last, another team receives the finished eggs, which are placed on small, wax-bottomed cardboard boxes that are sent to a packing facility, where the eggs are put into their respective boxes before reaching shelves at See’s shops.
The big event of Easter at See’s are its large eggs: The factory will produce a grand total of 400,000 this year, featuring patterns and decorations applied by hand. They vary in size from 6 to 14.5-ounces. Some fillings like marshmallow have to rest, and the eggs are enrobed in chocolate twice to ensure they have a thick and uniform cover — a process that can take up to four days — before the final decorative touches are applied by hand.
Maria Julia Castillo has been decorating See’s candies by hand for 21 years, making her the longest tenured decorator on the South San Francisco factory staff. She began 30 years ago in the packing department after arriving in the Bay Area from her native El Salvador. She now works on the six-person team responsible for decorating each large egg with fondant and frosting.
This Easter will be Castillo’s last one as a decorator, as she plans on retiring. “We have such a nice, hard-working group here,” Castillo said in Spanish. “There is lots of harmony, we trust each other and get the work done.”
Castillo demonstrates the multistep process on one of the 9,000 chocolate-pecan-filled eggs her team is decorating. First, with a smooth, bobbing motion they apply a border made of bright pink frosting to create a frame that’s wavy and has a lacy texture. Then, four stems drawn with green frosting go into the center of the oval, adorned with green frosting leaves. Finally come the fondant rosebuds, held in place by the frosting, to be festooned with more frosted leaves.
Castillo says every decorator must go through a special training to master consistency and shape making. Because each flower is also handmade, bouquets have flowers with petals that are slightly more open, bulbous or angled.
In a small building adjacent to the factory, See’s operates one of its more than 200 shops. Castillo plans on returning to the store as a shopper after retirement. She hopes to buy some peanut squares and rocky road eggs, her favorite, even after she has stopped decorating them. “Of course I’m coming back to buy eggs. All the former workers come back for candy, too,” she said.