Sweet Company

The still-soft hearts stream into dryers, where each five-eighths-inch heart rides 700 feet along 13 conveyors -- a trip that takes more than an hour. (Necco Wafers go through exactly the same process, often on parallel manufacturing lines.) At the end, firm hearts of different colors and different sayings are mixed. The hearts either cascade down a floor to be boxed or bagged, or are stored in huge bags until Wal-Mart or Target say how they want the hearts packaged.

What is most staggering about the production of those hearts is simply the quantity. In an enormous storage room for candy hearts, in a single clump that is otherwise dwarfed by open floor space, sit 18 white bags of miniature Sweethearts. Each bag is the size of a haystack and holds from 1,200 pounds to 1,500 pounds of hearts. That one part of the room holds 9 tons of hearts.

"We can't stop the machines," says Marshall. "We have to make hearts -- 60,000 pounds a day. Sometimes in this room," Marshall says as he waves his hand through the refrigerated air, "we'll have 3 million or 4 million pounds of hearts."

Tough Man, Soft Heart

Domenic M. Antonellis, the 60-year-old man who presides over Necco as CEO, president, penny-pincher, and protector, grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts. As a boy, with just a quarter to spend, he could afford a movie and a roll of Neccos. He would trade the licorice ones for chocolate or would simply flick them at the screen. When he first walked into the Cambridge plant in 1967 as a consultant, he says, workers were moving wafers around by hand, on trays. No conveyor belts. There was so much waste and breakage, Antonellis says, "I could walk ankle-deep in Necco wafers."

In 1968, Antonellis left General Motors to join Necco. Thirty-three years later, 23 years after being named president, Antonellis displays a license plate on his Cadillac that reads: "Necco." "I love the business," he says. "I live the business."

And Antonellis runs the business with the same blend of tradition and modernity that his 90-year-old, computer-driven candy machines use to make hearts. He refuses to tinker with the basics of his candies. Indeed, the company still roasts and grinds its own peanuts for peanut butter, and still melts, cooks, and mixes its own chocolate in huge copper kettles. (The Cambridge factory has an entirely separate plumbing system just to move liquid chocolate around.) But Antonellis also wholeheartedly embraces new-economy adaptability. For example, anyone can order a custom run of hearts with custom sayings -- as long as they are willing to pay for a full 3,500 pounds of them, or 1.6 million candies.

"Dollar Tree came to us; they wanted a 4.5-ounce bag of Clark bars, the coconut-crunch style," Antonellis says. "They wanted a peg-bag to hang up. We didn't have anything. We said, Okay, we can do that. We gave them the snack size, at a price point that worked for them. They bought 800,000 bags. Those bags are on a truck right now. So for a quick talk with someone, we made $600,000. I'll talk to anybody. That's what keeps us growing."

Lori Botkin is the candy buyer for another Necco customer, Family Dollar Stores Inc. "We like all of our product to be prepriced, so customers know the price when they pick it up," Botkin says. "Necco can do that for us. We try to hit a certain price point -- and Necco helps us do that by changing the package size slightly. The big guys, Hershey, Mars, Nestlé, they can't do any of that -- and they won't do it. Necco is very cooperative, and it's become very creative."

Antonellis's success has produced the most complicated strategic decision of his career at Necco. He has acquired so many candy companies that both the Necco facility in Cambridge and the Haviland facility a mile away are at capacity. The lease at Haviland is about to expire and won't be renewed. The landmark Cambridge plant now counts as its neighbors such high-tech highfliers as Biogen, Genzyme, Oncogene Science, and OraVax. Developers who want to renovate the site as office space for technology companies have offered Antonellis so much for the facility that he almost can't afford to continue making candy there.

Indeed, the Cambridge factory, with its huge, open spaces, its 14-inch-thick concrete floors, and its prime Charles River location, is worth at least as much as Necco's business itself -- except that without the factory, there is no business. So Antonellis is wrestling over whether to consolidate in Cambridge, which would make things very cramped, or to sell the building and use the proceeds to build something more spacious and modern elsewhere.

"I have the building sold, if I want to sell it," he says. "I'm quaking, the number is so big. The consultants, they say, 'Dom, move to central Massachusetts. They'll be so happy to see you out there, some municipality will give you the site.' But I've got skilled labor here. With the kind of things we do, you can't build those skills into people quickly enough so that a move wouldn't hurt the product. Plus, we have a strong moral obligation to these people who have worked for us for so long. All the associates have to come along."