Nation's oldest candy company still operating in Witch City (2024)

Come along with us as we check into Salem, Massachusetts, where it's always October. Hi. My name is Sylvan and this is the year old Pepper Company. Yield Pepper Company is the oldest continuously operating candy company in the United States. And they've been in business since 18 06, which is just 17 years after Massachusetts became *** state. Now, I see lots of candy, but where's all the Pepper were called Yields Pepper Company because of *** family name. Actually, *** lot of people find that confusing but were named for John and George Pepper to add *** little more confusion. The company was actually founded by *** Mile woman named Mary Spencer. She survived *** shipwreck and was brought ashore to Salem when they found out that Mary Spencer knew how to make candy, which was *** rare and valuable skill. In the early 18 hundreds. The people of Salem donated *** barrel of sugar to her so that she could get back on her feet and she started selling the Gibraltar's and became the first commercially sold candy in the United States. The Spencer family eventually sold the company to John Pepper who then gave the his son, George and George ended up selling the company to two of his employees. George and Alice Birkin Shaw, they are the ancestors of the current owners. So we're on the 3rd and 4th generation of Birkin Shaw ownership. I'd like to be on my third or fourth piece of candy by now. What do you recommend? Yield pepper is famous primarily for our historical candies. The Gibraltar are original and the blackjacks and then in modern candy, we're now for our turtles. So sorry. Did you say Gibraltar or Jib Roni? I'm very aware of what *** job Rony is because that's what my friends call me. But what's *** Gibraltar? Gibraltar is *** simple handmade confection. It's made of boiled sugar with either lemon or peppermint oil and then it gets stretched out as though it were *** taffy, but it hardens to the consistency of an after dinner mint. It's firm at first, but it dissolves when you bite into it. We sometimes have to break the Gibraltar's with *** hammer because when they're first made their incredibly hard and difficult to eat, they soften up over time. The hammer just makes it easier to turn them into *** conventional hard candy. The turtles actually got *** big boost of popularity when they were featured by Oprah Winfrey as *** favorite thing in 2009, you get *** turtle and you get *** turtle and you get *** turtle, turtles for everyone yield pepper candy company features *** lot of regional favorites like Molasses, Cranberries and Maple. What's Sylvan's favorite thing about working here? My favorite thing about working here as kind of history and food nerd is meeting people from all over the world and seeing kind of regional preferences around food. We sell Panucci fudge and I didn't know until I started working here that that's kind of *** Massachusetts specialty. Most people haven't even heard of Panucci and can't pronounce it. So, I think it's kind of neat to see how people respond to the stuff that I grew up with.