Making the links on the Internet this week has been David Roth’s article in Slate about his job as a baseball-card writer for Topps, which also makes Ring Pops and Bazooka bubble gum. His recollections took me back to my years as a staff writer for a pair of national trade magazines for the candy industry, a job I had when I lived in Cleveland, right up until the point I moved here to New York1.
Writing about candy wasn’t much more romantic than trade-press writing for other big industries. I dealt with the usual deadline pressures, fended off persistent PR flaks and interviewed executives from private companies who were loath to divulge anything more than press-release tidbits.
The travel perks were expansive and mind-altering. In Chicago, I watched Jelly Belly manufacture its signature jelly beans and conversed with the company’s founders at length about conjuring flavors from scratch. I saw gumdrops, chocolates and kids’ candy parade down conveyor belts in Brazil and Mexico. Every year in Cologne, Germany, I walked miles among hundreds of booths at the world’s largest candy trade show. In a hotel ballroom in Canada, I witnessed grizzled candy executives tear up over receiving lifetime achievement awards. I’ve been to Hershey, a magical place in Pennsylvania smelling of chocolate and cow shit, and stayed at the Hershey Lodge, the large and luxurious halls of which resemble those of the hotel in The Shining.
And I ate a lot of candy. I didn’t gain much weight but by way of cavity-shadowed X-rays and rounds of drilling, I helped my dentist fund his costly hobby custom-building offroad sport vehicles.
1 Coincidentally, right after I moved here I had an informational interview with a rep from Topps, which is headquartered just off Madison Square Park. But nothing came of it because the company farms out its PR through an external agency and wasn’t looking to hire any in-house writers. [back]