It wasn’t the sweet compromise Mayor Richard M. Daley was seeking.
Despite face-to-face pleas from Daley, Marshall Field’s will not keep Frango mint production in Chicago where it had been for 70 years, Dan Skoda, president of the old-line department store, told the mayor during a private meeting Wednesday afternoon.
“Our decision was based on the quality of the product we wanted to give our guests,” Skoda said. “Our decision is final. We’re not changing our minds.”
The company’s refusal to back down seems to be an affront to Daley, who has taken the retailer’s decision to shut down its State Street candy kitchen personally.
The response was “very disappointing” to the mayor, said spokeswoman Jacquelyn Heard. “We feel we have the resources and the talent here to continue to make Frango mints.”
The meeting between Daley and Skoda was calm, said one City Hall source familiar with what happened in Daley’s office. But the mayor “kept asking, `Why didn’t you contact us earlier? We could have these jobs. There were plenty of places we could have gone.’ “
Heard promised that the mayor will have more to say about the Frango fracas Thursday.
Daley has made no secret that he is angry that Field’s and its parent company, Minneapolis-based Dayton Hudson Corp., decided to outsource Frango production without contacting the city about alternative sites or subsidies for retaining manufacturing jobs.
In fact, Daley requested the meeting with Skoda in hopes of persuading Field’s to use a Chicago candymaker instead.
But instead of soothing the mayor, Skoda may have added insult to injury. He told reporters after the meeting that no Chicago candymaker was good enough to make Frangos, although one local company did make it to the Frango finals. Field’s gave selected finalists the recipe for Frangos, the list of suppliers and samples of the candy and asked them to produce the best Frangos possible.
“Our first concern was to get the Frango product exactly the way we produced it in our own kitchens. And the tests we did in Chicago, the product was not appropriate. I am sorry,” Skoda said.
That explanation made the Frango outsourcing decision worse, said Friederika Kaider, director of the Candy Institute, a non-profit group that seeks to promote candymaking in the city of Chicago.
“It’s dismaying to everyone. It’s greatly elitist to say that companies that have been here for two and three generations couldn’t make Frangos,” Kaider said. The Candy Institute was ready to propose that Frango production be moved to either Fannie May Candy Co. or World’s Finest Chocolate Inc., both of which have extra capacity.
Skoda’s rationale also didn’t explain why Field’s didn’t look at moving its own candymaking equipment and workers somewhere else in Chicago, she pointed out.
Ed Opler, manager of sales operations for World’s Finest Chocolate on the Southwest Side, also was taken aback.
“I’m surprised he would say something like that. It would have been nice to have the opportunity to make a proposal. But we were never contacted,” Opler said.
Politically, the Frango fight has presented Daley with a no-lose proposition. He has voiced his support for the union workers who lost their jobs, while criticizing a Minneapolis company that continues to tinker with a historic Chicago institution.
The mayor showed last week he was willing to play political hardball to keep Frango production in Chicago. The Chicago Plan Commission deferred action on a proposal to expand a Target store on Chicago’s North Side. Normally, such a request would be a slam dunk for Dayton Hudson, which owns the fast-growing Target discount chain.
But the city may be relaxing its position somewhat. When Heard was asked if the Target store would continue to be held hostage, she replied, “Those are two separate issues.”
