For devotees of the Clark Bar, the news couldn’t be sweeter.
After a nearly two-year drought, Clark Bars are rolling off the production line from their new home at Boyer Candy Co. in Altoona. They’ll be available starting Valentine’s Day exclusively in Pittsburgh where the iconic chocolate-covered crunchy peanut butter concoction was created more than 100 years ago.
“We wanted to take care of Pittsburgh first,” said Anthony Forgione, 42, owner of Boyer Candy, creator of the Mallo Cup. “We wanted to relaunch it where it all started, for the people who appreciate it most.”
Boyer has been working on getting Clark Bars back into production since buying the rights, recipe and equipment in September 2018, several months after the previous owner — New England Confectionery Co. (Necco) near Boston — shut down.
Clark Bars will be available starting Friday at major candy suppliers in the area, including McKeesport Candy Co. in McKeesport; Katie’s Kandy, Downtown; S&S Candy, South Side; and Grandpa Joe’s in the Strip District. A limited supply also will be handed out for free at various locations across the city that day, Mr. Forgione said.
Giant Eagle and other area retailers should have them in stock in the coming weeks, he said. A broader rollout to the rest of the Northeast and beyond is planned for the coming months.
Jon Prince, owner of McKeesport Candy on Fifth Avenue in McKeesport, said the comeback of the Clark Bar is exciting.
“They are bringing back a trophy,” said Mr. Prince, whose grandfather sold Clark Bars from the trunk of his car during the early years.
“It’s like the Pittsburgh Steelers bringing home the Super Bowl. It belongs to us. Clark Bars are a huge part of Pittsburgh heritage,” he said. “I give Boyer a lot of credit for what they are doing.”
Getting the beloved candy back on the shelves hasn’t been easy.
Mr. Forgione initially expected to have Clark Bars rolling off conveyor belts a year ago.
“I didn’t appreciate the complexities of making a Clark Bar,” which starts out as a hot sugary liquid that’s cooled, stretched by pulling machines into a taffy, encased in hot peanut butter, then “enrobed” by a waterfall of milk chocolate.
“It’s a different skill set from what we were familiar with,” he said, which is making “cup” candy, including peanut butter, Smoothie butterscotch and the company’s flagship chocolate/marshmallow Mallo cups, which date to the mid-1930s.
Problems started early on. A list of ingredients came with the deal, but the step-by-step instructions for putting them all together to make a candy bar were sketchy.
The machinery had to be rebuilt, some of it almost from scratch.
After months of work, and with input from former Necco workers and retired Clark Bar employees in Pittsburgh — where the candy was produced from its creation by David L. Clark in 1917 until it was sold off in a bankruptcy auction to Necco in 1999 — Boyer got the flavor and consistency right.
“It was very time-consuming,” Mr. Forgione said.
Then came the production snafus.
During test runs, batches were coming off the line in the shape of hot dogs. (Those rejects were ground up and used as the inspiration for crunchy peanut butter cups called Clark Cups, which were produced with existing machinery and hit the market last spring.)
Timing on the assembly line also was an issue.
“We literally were catching them as they shot 5 feet [in the air] off the line,” Mr. Forgione said. “We were having a blast.”
Mr. Forgione — whose late father purchased Boyer in 1984 and made an unsuccessful bid to buy the Clark Bar at the 1999 bankruptcy auction — said he was proud to be able to rescue the historic candy.
“When we bought it, I didn’t fully appreciate what it meant to people,” he said. “Then we started getting calls and it became clear to us that this coming off the market was a real sense of loss.
“I’d like to thank the people of Pittsburgh, first for their patience and second for their dedication to this brand,” he said. “I think they will be really pleased with the product and hope they enjoy it.”
Patricia Sabatini: PSabatini@post-gazette.com; 412-263-3066.
First Published: February 13, 2020, 3:00 p.m.
Updated: February 13, 2020, 3:07 p.m.
