Free Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond

town. I used to go up on the roof and walk around at night. It was very peaceful. Then, as the business expanded, I graduated to an apartment, which doubled as an office, and then I graduated to an office and an apartment.”
    Traino, who had a friendly, somewhat scattered phone manner, told me a story about a young woman who came out from Michigan in search of an obscure fruit candy called Deltha Rolls. She sounded “you know, young and cute” on the phone, so Traino talked up the business and invited her to drop by the office. “I’m sure she thought it was going to be some huge warehouse. But it was just me, a guy living in his office.”
    Modesty notwithstanding, Traino was one of the first people to foresee the tremendous potential of the nostalgia candy market. Long before Ralph Lauren’s daughter Dylan opened her candy boutique in Manhattan, Traino was peddling Deltha Rolls on-line. Today, he does about a million per year in sales and has four employees and a large air-conditioned facility for storage. One thing hasn’t changed: his customers still tend to freak out when discussing their childhood candy passions. Occasionally, they weep. And they react with vehemence when manufacturers alter a recipe. A few months earlier, a Canadian company had bought out Fleer and made a slight change in the production of Double Bubble. Traino was bombarded with calls from customers desperate for the original formula.
    Several years ago, he got a tip from some friends in the industry that Black Jack, a popular old-school licorice gum, was going to be discontinued. He spent half his savings buying up the available stock. “I had it all in my kitchen cupboards, because I was running the business out of my apartment at that point and I was sitting there looking at all this gum and I was scared to death. But I sold tons of that stuff, because I was the last person in the country to have Black Jack. It was the best investment I ever made.”
    This was a common situation for Traino. He had become, in this sense, a candy speculator, a last resort for the unrequited freak. He no longer even needed industry informants. He was able to figure out when a brand was going to be discontinued by the flood of calls from consumers unable to find it in stores.
    At the same time, he was loathe to regard himself as a liquidator. He actually hated it when companies decided to drop a brand. He was furious when one of Nestlé’s subsidiaries stopped making Wacky Wafers. “I talked to one of their product managers and he told me something about Wacky Wafers being too similar to Bottle Caps and how one line is cannibalizing the other line, something like that. This guy didn’t even understand the difference between the products. Wacky Wafers are fruit-flavored. They’re about the size of quarters. Bottle Caps are much smaller and they’re flavored like sodas, which, I’m sorry, are not fruits. But you know what happens with these companies? They get a bunch of MBAs in there who’ve been working with computers and they don’t care about candy. They’re just in it to make a buck.”
    Traino had reached an interesting juncture in his moral logic. Because, after all, he too was in candy to make a buck. And yet, it was obvious he felt a true dedication to candy, that his product had become more than product to him. Traino had a hard time remaining indignant, though. He was too much of an optimist.
    “What these companies should do,” he decided, “Hershey’s or one of the other big ones, they should buy up some of these smaller companies and start, like, a nostalgia line of candies. They could bring back the candies from the fifties and sixties and seventies. People love that stuff. What would be really cool is for candy to go the way that beer has, with all those microbrews that came in. Local candy bars could make a resurgence! That’s one of my big plans, to get into manufacturing. But you’d have to start small, with gift shops and word of