Totally Hands On

When I stepped through the door at the Bluebird Candy Company in Logan, UT, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.

I was totally wrong.

I’ve photographed many candy companies that make their own chocolate candies. For most, it’s like an assembly line. First you melt, or temper, the chocolate, you pour it into molds and then you let it cool and harden. The artisan chocolate makers add a little flair but it’s almost the same process.

At the Bluebird Candy Company, I was not prepared for what I found.

As I walked into a back room, or the production area, there sat two women at a marble-topped table, with a trough of chocolate in front of each, a tray of centers to their left, a tray of dipped chocolates to their right and a paint scraper nearby.

What followed was definitely an art.

The Bluebird Candy Company makes hand-dipped chocolates, which they’ve been doing for over a hundred years. The company ships worldwide, usually to people who moved away from Logan and are looking for a piece of home or to those that have gotten their chocolates as gift from somebody living in Logan and are hooked.

For a company with worldwide demand, you’d expect them to be embracing technology and the digital age. Not quite.

A visit to their web site finds a page that looks and feels like one from the beginning of the internet. All in all, it tells you to call the store for a list of chocolates and to place an order.

As the women agree to let me take their pictures, they prefer that I shoot only their hands. They jokingly say taking their picture steals their soul. I manage to get a couple of frames of the two of them at the table but focus mainly on their hands.

As the sounds of country music flow from a 1980’s era boom box, they grab a center (today their making caramel creme), dip it into the chocolate, swirl it around, plop it down on a tray and delicately finish it off with a figure-8 or the “signature” for the caramel creme.

Each candy has it’s own signature. There are roughly 16 candies, each made in both milk and dark chocolate. A hand-printed sign on the wall shows all the signatures in case one of them has a momentary memory lapse.

Every so often they scoop out some more chocolate from the trough, swirl it around to let it cool and thicken, sometimes adding water if needed, and scraping to keep their pile of chocolate goodness in a neat little pile. Then they'd dip another chocolate.

They could easily modernize the process: bring in their chocolate on 18-wheeler tanker trucks, put in huge machines with mile long conveyor belts that churn out chocolate candies like a Henry Ford production line and maybe even open an amusement park. At that point, you would call them Hershey.

But hand-dipping makes Bluebird unique. And if you’ve been doing something right for over a hundred years, why change?