COOKING AND DEPOSITING
Bringing the Then and now – the Sky bar Was created in 1938 by
back to life T
NECCO and is now produced by the owner of a Massa- chusetts-based general store.
Suzanne Callander reports on how a novice confectionery producer has been able to bring a well-loved complex moulded chocolate bar back to life with a compact, automated moulding solution.
he Sky Bar was invented in 1938 by US-based confectionery company New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) and is reported to have been the first moulded chocolate bar
to have multiple different flavoured centres. Chocolate bars of a similar moulded form started popping up around the early 1900s, but none had the same internal complexity of the Sky Bar, and it became the candy of choice for many families in the US. Sadly, for this innovative candy bar, in the Autumn of 2018 NECCO, the oldest candy company in the United States at the time of its closure in 2018, filed for bankruptcy and auctioned off its assets. While many of its brands were acquired, no one seemed to want to take on the Sky Bar Louise Mawhinney, the owner of Sudbury, Massachusetts based general store, Duck Soup, knew of the chocolate bar because so many of her customers loved it. “We put in a bid and
22 Kennedy’s Confection February 2024
became the owners of the Sky Bar brand,” said Louise. While the acquisition included all of the recipe formulations, it did not include any of the equipment needed to produce the bars. “I learned later that the reason there were
no other bids for the Sky Bar was due to its production complexity,” says Louise. The four sections of the chocolate bar each contain a different type of centre – caramel, vanilla, peanut and fudge. The original NECCO process was highly automated on a complex chocolate moulding line that first deposited a milk chocolate shell. Then, four additional separate depositors filled each section of the chocolate shell. A final sixth depositor finished the backside of the chocolate bar. With so many depositors and multiple cooling towers, the industrial line was likely over 100 feet (30 metres) long. Replicating this process was simply not feasible for Louise. In January 2019, Louise began to look for alternative methods to manufacture Sky Bars. She relied on the expertise of Jeff Green, a
former NECCO R&D veteran, who had worked at the company for 30 years. Around the same time, the retail space next door to Duck Soup became available, and in a stroke of luck, it was already zoned for light manufacturing. “It was a gift,” says Louise, who had been looking for manufacturing space outside the city. “Today we have so much cross over staff between Duck Soup and Sky Bar. Having our manufacturing located anywhere else would have been a nightmare.”
Space constraints However, manufacturing next door to the shop meant that Sky Bar would need to adhere to some stringent space constraints. Initially, it appeared that the only solution would be a labour-intensive shell moulding process which would require operators to manually move moulds through a series of many moulding stations. Before they took this route, Jeff contacted
a fellow industry veteran, John Micelli from Egan Food Technologies, whose own history
KennedysConfection.com
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