Chocolate maker launches expansion

ST. STEPHEN, New Brunswick – Canada’s oldest chocolate candy-making family Wednesday announced a $6 million (Canadian) expansion for its facilities at 1 Chocolate Drive.

The 19,000-square-foot Ganong Bros. Ltd. project is expected to create 65 jobs during the next two years.

The company is based just across the St. Croix River from Calais, Maine.

It produces more than 375 product lines of boxed chocolates, fruit snacks and bagged confections. Its products are shipped worldwide.

This year the company is celebrating its 130th anniversary.

“Ganong has a longstanding reputation as a national leader in the confectionery industry. This new project will create jobs and strengthen the prosperity of the St. Stephen area, while allowing the company to increase production and sell more of its products to large customers in the United States,” said New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord, who was on hand for Wednesday’s announcement.

The expansion is the second recent change in the company’s production facilities.

In 1990, Ganong built a $12 million, 133,0000-square-foot plant just north of the downtown.

The company employs more than 200 full-time workers and has been owned and managed by four generations of the family.

Last year, nearly one-third of the candy and fruit snacks produced at the St. Stephen plant were exported to the United States, David Ganong, president of the company, said Wednesday. “We are bulking up, becoming bigger and therefore more efficient.”

The company’s presence has led St. Stephen to become known as Canada’s Chocolate Town.

In 1885, the Ganong brothers invented the Chicken Bone, a hard candy with a cinnamon-flavored jacket and a chocolate center.

In 1888, the company was the first to imprint chocolates by use of embossed celluloid pads. Gilbert Ganong patented the process.

In 1912, the company introduced what it says was the first 5-cent chocolate nut bar in North America, a claim that is challenged by the U.S.-based Hershey’s.

After the manufacturing plant was built in 1990, the federal and provincial governments spent $5.8 million to turn the former chocolate factory on Milltown Boulevard in downtown St. Stephen into a museum.

Today, people who visit the museum can see how the sugary goods were made in the 1800s.