Friend to All Candy: Chick-O-Stick and Bit-O-Honey

We took a little vacation last week to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which is an awesome little town, small (like 2000 people small) and sometimes a little scary in Twin Peaks sort of way, but the locals we met were friendly and open. Is this because the economy of the town depends on dense city folk like us antiquing and eating lots of food and stumbling over each other in search of quaintness? I suppose that's possible. I'll just pretend I didn't realize that.

In any case, on any road trip Beth and I are in search of candies we can't find in Kansas City. Steve Almond's seminal book on the dying art of independent candy-making, Candyfreak, got my regional candy ball rolling six or seven years ago. I'm always on the lookout for candies I've never seen, or candies I haven't had since I lived in another part of the country.

Sadly, I don't have too much to report from the trip. It really is getting harder and harder to find candy that isn't produced by a huge corporation, but I did find a couple of things that made me happy. 

The first is Bit-O-Honey. Though it's now owned by Pearson's Candy Company of St Paul, Minnesota, it was sold to them in May of this year by the Nestle Company, who acquired it in 1984. When I saw it I was pretty excited. I'd only ever seen the little Bit-O-Honeys that were prevalent during the Halloweens of my youth, which would have coincided with Nestle's acquisition of the property. But I can't remember the last time I saw one of those, really.

Unwrapped, the Bit-O-Honey is a just six of the small Bit-O-Honeys in a row, separated by wax paper.

Here's an individual piece:

It's good. It's better than I remember actually, but I was a notoriously picky kid. I didn't like really chewy candy. Nowadays I love it. It's basically a honey-flavored taffy with almond bits. As you might imagine, the honey and almonds work really well together. There aren't so many almond bits that they take over. I actually didn't notice they were in there in the first piece I had; it just tasted like it had a nut flavoring of some kind. But there are almond bits in there, which is actually a nice touch.

The second candy we found I'd never heard of before. Chick-O-Stick (man, I love that hyphenated -O- in candy names) was created during The Great Depression by Atkinson's Candy Company. It's never been owned by or produced by any other company, which makes this a great candy find. It's rare that these candies get shelf space in stores, and in truth we found it at the register of an antique store, not at a gas station or a grocery store. It makes sense; the last thing the owner of a convenience store or a gas station wants to worry about is which of the thousands of possible candies to choose to stock the store. Big candy companies, like Hershey, Cadbury and the like, can offer premiums to stores to stock only their candies, so the little guys get left out altogether. As you can see from Atkinson's distribution map, the smaller companies have to hustle for space wherever they can get it, usually in non-national chains.

I did my best to ignore the terrible early-aughts "extreme" font exclaiming "BREAK ME!" and "SHARE ME!"

Here's what it looks like:

A dusting of coconut on the outside, crunchy peanut butter flavor on the inside. It's basically a Butterfinger without the chocolate coating, which is fine by me. It was created after the Butterfinger, and after Butterfinger was featured in the 1934 Shirley Temple film "Baby Take A Bow." Coincidence? Probably not. I have to say, though, the coconut actually lends the candy a slightly different flavor than a Butterfinger, and I wouldn't mind getting my hands on some more of these.

That was all we found on this trip, though I'm pretty committed to getting my hands on more candies I've never had before and delving into the history of cheap, unhealthy confections. If I have to order them via the internet, so be it. But I discovered a shop called Candy Time out in Overland Park the other day, which will hopefully satiate my desire for independent candies.