Candymaking in Canada. David Carr
their part, Hershey Food neither agrees nor disputes whether Ganong has a legitimate claim. As author David Folster notes in his historical account of the Ganongs, a reporter for Canadian Press wrote that the American company “does not quarrel with the claim that the Ganong family of St. Stephen, N.B., invented the chocolate bar in 1910—in fact, it is unaware of it.”3
As recently as September 2000, Maclean’s magazine listed the chocolate bar alongside the zipper, frozen food, snow blower, and Fuller Brush as Canadian firsts. At the very least, Arthur and George should be credited with inventing the first chocolate bar mixed with nuts. But even this is in dispute by American writer Ray Broekel, who claims Squirrel Brand of Cambridge, Massachusetts, created the first nut bar in 1906.
Before there was Ganong candy available in New Brunswick, however, there was Moirs in neighbouring Nova Scotia.
In 1815, shortly after arriving in Nova Scotia from Scotland, Benjamin Moir began selling bread and other baked goods to Imperial troops from his modest home in Halifax. The troops were housed in the neighbouring Citadel, overlooking Halifax harbour. The Citadel had been built by the British sixty-six years earlier as one of four overseas naval stations.
Benjamin’s son William C. Moir inherited the bakery in 1845, first changing the name of the business to the Moir & Company Steam Bakery and Flour Mill, and later moving to a five-storey factory on Argyle Street, across from a site that would eventually become Halifax City Hall.
William was anxious that his own “lean stripling” of a son, James, also learned the bakery business. James, who was already described as something of a renegade, went through the motions of learning the skills of a baker, but did not share his father or grandfather’s enthusiasm for the trade. Mom-and-pop candymakers like McCormick’s Limited in London, Ontario were springing up across Canada, and James struggled to convince his father that there was a future in chocolate and other confectionery.
Despite his father’s protestations, James continued to be consumed with the development of sugared almonds and popular candy sticks, often ignoring the day-to-day responsibilities of the family business. Finally, in 1873, a reluctant William Moir relented. “If you’re going to fool around with this candy business, you had better take a corner over there and get on with it,” he told his son.
Eighteen seventy-three was, indeed, an interesting year for the Canadian confectionery industry. Rather than a year of great hope, which would feed the appetite for such businesses, it was the start of a five-year depression spurred on by a financial panic in New York that September.
It was against this backdrop of collapsing prices, high unemployment, and depressed growth that two brothers opened a general store in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, an industrial town on the banks of the St. Croix River.
The two native New Brunswickers, James Ganong, who had left Canada and was a salesman for the Thurston & Hall Biscuit Co. of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and Gilbert, who taught school outside of St. John, had hoped to attract custom by offering a better range of groceries than was currently available. The enterprise proved to be more difficult than either could have imagined.
courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.
Gilbert White Ganong, co-founder of the company.
courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.
James Harvey Ganong, co-founder of the company.
There was not much money in St. Stephen during those days, and local residents were suspicious of the strange new upstarts. Compounding the problem was the fact that millworkers who lived in neighbouring communities were either poorly paid or were provided with goods from the company store in exchange for their hard labour.
The pessimism in St. Stephen contrasted sharply with the optimism in Halifax, where James Moir was finally handed the opportunity to trade the flour and yeast of baking for the sugar, molasses, and cocoa of confectionery, full-time. By day he would experiment with different types of chocolate blends in a small corner in the Moirs factory, and by night he would sit on Citadel Hill, not far from where his grandfather first began supplying baked goods to British soldiers, tasting his experiments.
It was during these years that James developed the family XXX formula for what would later become the mainstay of Moirs chocolates.
As Halifax entered the last decade of the nineteenth century, William Moir decided it was time for his son to take over the business. In 1890, seventeen years after James had been given free rein to make candy rather than bake bread, he became president and general manager, immediately increasing the presence of candy in the company’s growing product line.
The history of Moirs was part of a pattern in early Canadian candymaking that concentrated the bulk of the new country’s confectionery industry in the east. But chocolate did not transport well in the nineteenth century and was in fact expensive to ship. This barrier alone gave rise to small mom-and-pop candymakers, producing small batches of candy suited to local and often neighbourhood tastes.
L.H. Belanger, which began manufacturing candies in Montreal in 1881, produced an elaborate soft toffee called St. Catherine, which has never sold well outside of Quebec despite the one-time popularity of a cheaper version of toffee-based candy chews called Halloween Kisses.
All major candymakers in Canada faced common challenges: importing expensive ingredients such as sugar and cocoa (essential to manufacturing chocolate and candies) and serving a small population narrowly spread out in concentrated pockets along the world’s longest border.
Feeding such a population base was difficult enough for confectioners in the east. The challenge was magnified west of the Ontario border. Western-based independents with aspirations to follow the pace set by the Moirs and Ganong families often found they could not gather the traction to break out of local markets.
It is for this reason that the multinational manufacturers based in the east today provide the bulk of confections to satisfy the sweet tooth of western Canadians. There are notable exceptions.
Charles W. Rogers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1854. Rogers was lured out west by the prospect of Klondike gold, but he never made it to the Klondike. He saw greater potential in Victoria selling provisions to the miners.
In 1885, Rogers and his wife, Leah, opened a small greengrocer on Victoria’s Government Street, a high-traffic thoroughfare that cut through the heart of the city up to the British Columbia legislature. The shop sold a variety of staple items, fresh fruits and vegetables, and a selection of quality candies imported from San Francisco. Candy was the most popular item on the Rogerses shelves, but delivery was hopelessly erratic, and the high tariffs contained in Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of 1878 made it unnecessarily expensive.
Rogers began experimenting with his own candy recipes in a small kitchen located at the back of his store. He would often rise at 4:00 A.M., dressed only in his red underwear, stirring his candy centres as they bubbled in a large copper kettle. Leah, who had previously worked as a printing typesetter with the Daily Colonist, looked after the retail trade and administration.
Local inhabitants and visitors to Victoria travelled to Rogers’ shop to purchase assortments of chocolate-coated caramels, mint wafers, and chocolate almond brittle. As the candy side of the business grew, fruits and vegetables were getting in the way. Charles and Leah decided to discontinue the grocery side of the business and concentrate on candy.
“A pattern soon developed,” wrote camagazine. “Charles and Leah would make their chocolates early each day. The store on Government Street would open for a few hours in the afternoon, and, once the last chocolate was sold, the doors would close.”
On occasion, Charles and Leah were forced to ration boxes of their chocolates to one per customer.
In 1888, Rogers introduced his most unique and popular creation, cream