Sugar Baby

Jimmy Spradly's candy bar has already charmed the South. Can it sweet-talk its way into the national market as well?

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James W. Spradlry Jr., 28-year-old president of Standard Candy Co., walks in his factory amid brimming hoppers of peanuts and huge vats of caramel, watching a 7,000-gallon tank pour warm chocolate onto clumps of peanuts riding a conveyor belt. The floor is sticky and the atmosphere frenetic as each day the production line churns out more than 150,000 pieces of the company's main product -- a round, caloric amalgam of chocolate, peanuts, caramel, and marshmallow with the whimsical name of Goo GooCluster.

"When I first got here, this plant was making fewer than 50,000 Goo Goos a day," shouts Spradley, straining to be heard over the din of gurgling chocolate and clanking machinery "We're still operating at less than 40% capacity' meaning we can meet demand once business really starts to take off."

Take off is precisely what Standard Candy, located in Nashville, plans to do. Despite scant cash for advertising and only limited test marketing, Spradley wants to take his southern-based Goo Goo Cluster and sell it all over the country. One day, he dreams the Goo Goo will be battling with national top-selling brands like Snickers, a rival synthesis of peanuts and chocolate that is America's No. 1 candy bar.

For Standard Candy, with only $7 milion in annual sales -- and for Spradley, who has been in the candy business only two years -- it is a heady aspiration. Nationally, candy sales are growing at less than 80% a year, a pace that isn't expected to pick up anytime soon. And although there are hundreds of candy companies in the United States, only two of them account for nearly 70% of the entire candy bar market -- M&M/Mars, the candy division of Mars Inc., and Hershey Chocolate Co., the candy subsidiary of Hershey Foods Corp. The twin behemoths -- each of which did more than $1 billion worth of business in 1983 -- manufacture all of the nation's 10 best-selling candy bars and most of the top 20. Yearly sales of Mars's Snickers alone, estimated at more than $300 million, approach the revenues of some Fortune 500 companies.

What seems like a quixotic quest, however, must be measured against Standard Candy's two indisputable assets. One is the Goo Goo itself, which enjoys a clientele that is almost cultlike in its devotion. The other is Jimmy Spradley, who is considerably drier behind the ears than either his age or his ambitions might suggest. Put together, they make a combination that may yet follow one or another of the giants' bars off the retailer's shelf.

Back in 1912, Standard Candy founder Howell H. Campbell invented a candy bar -- naming it, so the story runs, after the sounds uttered by his baby son. Since then the Goo Goo cluster has been as intertwined with the region of its birth as twanging guitars and misty-blue mountains: Ask a Tennessee good ol' boy to recall his childhood, and Goo Goos are apt to be right up there with hunting and hoe-downs in the fond-memory department. Standard has always cultivated this downhome image, mostly by advertising heavily on Nashville's famous Grand Ole Opry Show, a country-music spectacle that is heard in about 35 states. "The South's Favorite Candy," the boxes of Goo Goos are labeled.

Until recently, you couldn't buy a Goo Goo more than 200 miles or so from downtown Nashville. But that didn't stop word of the bar or samples of it from trickling into the outside world. Candy aficionado and author Ray Broekel, who consumed two years and over 1,000 candy bars to write The Great American Candy Bar Book, announced that the Goo Goo was his all-time favorite. Tourists visiting the Opry -- and there are busloads of them every week -- tasted the Tenneseeans' delight and brought word of it to the folks back home. All told, some $100,000 in annual mail-order business around the world reflects the Goo Goo's mystique. Singers Dinah Shore and Pat Boone, both former Tennessee residents, regularly receive shipments of the bars, as does Hollywood tough-guy James Garner. The company gets as many as 100 letters a week either pleading for Goo Goos or singing their praises.

The Goo Goo has turned up in some other unlikely places as well. In 1982, Bloomingdale's ordered some for its Americana exhibit, as an example of a product indigenous to the South. The exhibit is long gone, but the Goo Goos remain So far, the store has sold more than $15,000 worth. Recently, too, the bars have become a minor fad in Washington, D. C., endearing themselves to prominent lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), and even, reportedly, to Ronald Reagan himself. Whether the candy has supplanted jelly beans as the favorite snack of the powerful can't be determined for sure. But if its growing trendiness is any indication, Goo Goos could be the hottest Tennessee product to invade the North since Jack Daniel's whiskey

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