Ah, the gummi bear.
That sweet, chewy, colorful little delicacy that few can resist. Walking through the manufacturing plant at Dae Julie Inc. in Des Plaines is enough to stir a craving.
The climate-controlled facility is filled with the aromas of the sweet fruit flavors that go into each of the candies rolling off the production line. And if an employee likes to taste a product as it comes through, management doesn’t raise a fuss.
Company CEO and Chairman of the Board David Babiarz of Inverness likes to point out that this is a fun industry. “You tell a child you’re going to a gummi bear factory and the eyes light up saying, `Bring me gummis,’ ” Babiarz said. “You tell an adult that you’re going, and you get the same look in an adult size.”
Babiarz should know something about gummis. In five years, he has built a multimillion-dollar business largely on the popularity of these squishy creatures and is in the process of expanding his operation.
Today, Dae Julie’s factory at 1665 E. Birchwood Ave. produces about 40 million pounds of candy annually, and the company expects to post about $40 million to $45 million in sales this year, Babiarz said. With expansion, Babiarz expects to produce 55 to 60 million pounds of candy.
That figure includes production and sales of a variety of other sweet chewy candies, but the majority of the production is in gummis of various shapes and colors.
And it’s not just bears. Dae Julie produces gummi worms, gummi zoo animals, gummi dinosaurs and gummi bunnies. During the holidays, the manufacturer introduced the gummi Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer line exclusively for Montgomery Ward & Co.
Babiarz considers Dae Julie “the largest unknown candy company in the United States” because few consumers are familiar with the name. Although it recently started selling gummis directly to consumers, most of the firm’s business is wholesale to customers who rebag the product under other labels. Some of these labels include Gummi Life Savers for Nabisco Foods, Dominick’s Finer Foods’ house brand and the Warner Candy Co., whose product is found on the shelves of many convenience stores.
It’s a little difficult to gauge exactly where Dae Julie falls in the overall market, but Babiarz believes his company to be among the top three manufacturers of gummi products in the U.S., and other industry observers agree the company is a major producer among the half-dozen or so companies in the market.
The Professional Candy Buyer magazine published a ranking of individual brand names according to sales volumes in 1994, and several brands manufactured by Dae Julie were in the top 25, including Gummi Life Savers at No. 1 and the company’s own Dae Julie brand at 21.
According to Mike Giannone, editor of the Cleveland-based trade magazine, gummi sales have been on the rise in this country since the product was introduced in the early 1980s, and this has drawn some of the largest candy manufacturers into the business.
“It’s a staple of the non-chocolate segment and one of its strongest categories,” Giannone said. “It seems to grow every year, and every year they come up with something new. It’s an unlimited market, and kids seem to love it.”
Giannone’s magazine showed gummi sales in 1994 at more than $110 million, nearly half of the $245 million soft chewy candy market.
Philip Kesler, president of Warner, said his company buys 120,000 to 150,000 pounds of candy a month from Dae Julie. Warner, with locations in Chicago and Schiller Park, distributes the product to all 48 contiguous states under its own and various private labels. Among the services provided by Dae Julie is bagging the product for distribution to retailers.
Kesler places Dae Julie among the nation’s top three gummi producers, and said the consistent quality of the product and service is what keeps Warner coming back.
“It’s their willingness to work with rebaggers like us,” Kesler said. “Gummis and jellies are very difficult products to package, and take special equipment. We never have a quality problem (with Dae Julie). They have people who are genuinely interested in us and their other customers.”
Gummis are a relatively new arrival on the American candy manufacturing scene. The candy was introduced as a German import, and Dae Julie was among the first to import gummis. Established more than 30 years ago by David Babiarz’s father, Emil, and named for his children David and Julie (Dae Julie, pronounced day ju-LAY, was thought to have an international flavor to it), the company imports about 15 million pounds of candy from across the globe under a number of labels, Babiarz said, in addition to producing its own.
It was the German-based Trolli Candy Co. that first manufactured the treat in the United States when it opened a factory in Creston, Iowa, in the mid-1980s, according to Jennifer Moore, a spokeswoman for Trolli.
It was the success of Trolli that caught the attention of manufacturers in the U.S., Babiarz said.
“They said, `This is a market,’ ” said Babiarz, who took over as company president in 1974 and later became CEO. ” `This is not a novelty item. This is not something that’s going to go away. It’s something people love, and it’s something we can build on.’ “
Babiarz decided in 1990 to take the plunge and expand from a candy importer to being a candy manufacturer as well. He purchased a former nut company (as in peanuts) on Birchwood Avenue in Des Plaines, retooled it with state-of-the-art equipment and named his new company Candyland Candies Inc. It retained that name until Jan. 1 of this year, when Candyland and Dae Julie merged into one company under the name Dae Julie.
The company also manufactures other fruit-flavored jelly candies such as orange slices, spearmint leaves and spice drops.
The plant is an impressive sight. Towering silos filled with sugar supply the main ingredient for making the candy, which also includes corn syrup, flavoring and gelatins. But the machine that drives the process is the mogul, which pours out board after board filled with gummi or jellied candies. The boards are then transported automatically to drying chambers in another section of the 120,000-square-foot facility.
Newer moguls operate much faster than those used just 10 years ago, and more of the process is automated, Babiarz said. By May of this year, the company anticipates completion of an expansion project that will add a third mogul.
Computers maintain consistency, ensuring the same quality in taste, texture and appearance of every gummi that rolls out, and climate control ensures the same environmental conditions inside the plant 365 days a year.
“Has technology made an impact on the business? It has had a drastic impact,” Babiarz said. “It’s incredible. The technology changes so rapidly that I think a plant built today is going to be an antique in five years.”
The current plant requires 140 employees to produce and ship 150,000 pounds of candy a day.
Although you might not find the traditional candymaker who painstakingly mixes different flavors to come up with the perfect candy, there are still craftsmen involved in the process, Babiarz said. But today’s candymaker wears a lab coat and is likely to have degrees in biochemistry or microbiology.
“You don’t have anybody tweaking formulas anymore,” Babiarz said. “Computers are controlling everything.”
Plant manager Anthony Habib of Carol Stream is one of those new-age candymakers.
Habib said the company is constantly experimenting with new and improved formulas. In response to nutrition concerns, the company has introduced real fruit juice flavors and is working on products using more natural ingredients and vitamin supplements.
“Over the years we’ve modified the formula a little bit here and a little bit there to make sure we can give a piece of candy that most people consider to be ideal,” Habib said.
There is still a test kitchen, but something that was a success in the test kitchen may not be so great when it is mass produced. To avoid that costly mistake, Dae Julie has developed a miniature model of its operation that replicates the conditions of full production on a much smaller scale.
But one thing technology and R&D cannot take the place of is consumers. So Dae Julie has one other test that can tell as much about the possible success of the new formula as the computers and the guys in the lab coats.
“Our neighborhood is saturated with kids,” Habib said. “So if we have a new flavor, new texture or new concept that we want to run by somebody, we’ll make a batch of it and bring it to the neighborhood. Between watching the kids and moms react to it, we can tell which way it’s going to go.”
Babiarz concurred: “If the neighborhood kids don’t like it, we don’t go forward.”
