Have you never tried Enstrom caramel? You’re missing a Colorado holiday tradition.

GREAT JUNCTION — Ray and Amy Genrich held a basket full of Christmas-wrapped boxes as they waited in line at the checkout line at Enstrom Candies.

“Colorado is cracking. That’s what we call it,” Amy said, pointing to the boxes. “Our friends in Florida are so excited when we bring them the real thing.”

“Colorado crack” is a butter, hazelnut and chocolate confection that four generations of Enstrom family members have been making for nearly a century.

The “real thing” is the caramel purchased from the Enstrom mothership in downtown Grand Junction. The Enstrom retail store is where shoppers can watch through a wall of glass as hair and beard candy makers heat, spread, brush and sprinkle the simple ingredients that make up the essence of the famous Enstrom caramel.

Enstrom candy makers now produce half a million pounds of artisanal caramel each year. That’s 1.2 million calories — a number that people perusing towers of caramel boxes at the Enstrom store seem willing to ignore during the holidays.

“We are a tradition. We’re not just candy,” said Jim Simmons, Enstrom’s vice president of sales, representing the latest generation of the Enstrom family to take on the sweet business of running a business that his great-grandfather Chet Enstrom created it in 1929.

Over the past decade, with Jim, 38, and his brother Doug Simmons Jr., 40, at the helm, Enstrom Candies has continued to go far beyond the artisanal caramel that made the company famous. Enstrom Candies also produces approximately 50,000 additional pounds of handmade candies and chocolate novelties each year. Enstrom Store shelves and coolers include caramel popcorn, caramel bits for baking, sugar-free caramel, chocolate Christmas ornaments, mint bark, 50 rotating varieties of ice cream , as well as jars and boxes of bite-sized caramel pieces called petite.

The company’s biggest growth shift has taken place in the city-block-sized rear production area of ​​Enstrom Base, where these small ones are manufactured. There, machines produce an additional 2.5 million pounds of chocolate-covered caramel squares, which has allowed Enstrom’s to spread its treats around the world in recent years.

“It’s a necessary evil,” Jim said of the decision to add machine-made caramel to the company’s sweet repertoire.

Enstrom sells the machine-made caramel in individually packaged pieces to major retailers. Some put their own mark on it. Others choose to go for a name that has cachet in the world of caramel. Enstrom brand caramel is now sold in Costco aisles, in well-kept hands on the QVC network, in five-star Amazon listings, and in grocery store coolers.

This caramel is the same recipe as Chet’s original, but it has one attribute that the original does not have: it is shelf stable. Because it is completely coated in chocolate, the butter in the caramel cannot oxidize like it can in handmade slabs that are only coated in chocolate on the top and bottom.

Jim said his family was able to add shelf-stable caramel after hiring a candy consultant who came up with the method of continuing to use the all-important butter that is a main ingredient in caramel, but using protective chocolate, so this is not the case. There is no need to refrigerate or freeze it.

Dry climate and altitude are tricks of the caramel trade

Additions to the caramel that accounts for 95 percent of Enstrom’s sales allow the company to keep 270 employees busy year-round rather than the three to four months it takes to produce what Jim calls the direct-to-consumer side of the product. company — the handmade caramel that is only available in Enstrom stores.

Enstrom Candies produces enough caramel – made by hand and machine – to warrant expansion. The family recently broke ground on a new 50,000 square foot building that will house a warehouse, distribution center and office space. This will allow Enstrom Caramel to have even more of a global footprint.

Jim said Enstrom Candies is in final talks with a Japanese company that plans to begin selling Enstrom caramel on a large scale next year.

But the company’s expansion won’t include making the caramel outside of Colorado. He described caramel as similar to wine in that it is affected by geography.

“Cooking at altitude is the secret of our confectionery. The effect of altitude and dry climate are tricks of our trade,” Jim said.

Enstrom candies have survived in western Colorado’s dry climate since the Great Depression, when the craving for sweets seemed to outweigh economic hardship. Chet Enstrom opened his first ice cream parlor two months before the stock market crash. He had to change course to keep the company afloat. He took a refrigeration correspondence course and became a repairman for businesses whose chillers were broken.

Chet added caramel to his ice cream sales during World War II when housewives donated their batches of butter and sugar to him so he could make caramel and send it to their family members who were serving in the military overseas.

Other candy companies also survived the harsh times of the Great Depression and the wars that rocked the economy.

Russell Stover Candies began producing hand-dipped chocolates in Denver in 1923 and remained a Colorado-owned candy company until a decade ago. Its large Montrose factory closed in 2020 after the company was bought by Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Sprungli in 2014.

Hammond’s Candies began building a confectionery empire in Denver in 1920 with an early sweet offering of Carl’s Piggy Backs, a mound of chocolate topped with shredded coconut. It has expanded several times and has remained a Colorado-based company ever since.

Enstrom, Hammond’s and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory are now Colorado’s leading candy makers.

Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory didn’t hit the scene until 1981, when it opened its first store in Durango and built a factory in Durango a year later. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory now has 323 franchises worldwide. Twenty-six of them are in Colorado.

Chet Enstrom’s caramel recipe remains unchanged

Enstrom has chosen over the years to maintain his business in family mode. With the exception of Chet’s original partner in the ice cream shop, Harry Jones, the Enstrom family kept the operation in family hands even when politics might have intervened.

In 1964, Chet was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Colorado Legislature. He and his wife Vernie handed the business over to their son Emil and daughter-in-law Mary. Emil and Mary expanded their business to include mail order customers.

By 1979, there were 10,000 of those customers when their daughter, Jaimee, and her husband, Doug Simmons, took over the business.

The candy business they inherited included an office with a din of typewriters as orders were filled for customers whose names were kept on Rolodex cards. Each command had to be typed individually by hand.

Jaimee and Doug computerized the business. This season, about 30 customer service specialists take holiday orders by phone and online in a quiet office upstairs.

Jaimee and Doug began expansions that now include seven satellite retail stores in Western Colorado and Denver. They also continued Chet’s tradition of regularly donating caramel to service members overseas and, closer to home, to service organizations and schools.

The Enstroms never changed Chet’s original caramel recipe, except to increase the ingredient quantities with mounds of butter, bags of sugar, crates of almonds and slices of chocolate.

These quantities continue to increase as wholesale sales of Enstrom’s caramel have doubled in recent years. Direct-to-consumer sales have seen annual growth of approximately 3-5%.

Jim said the holidays always bring a big boost in sales because family conflicts and business setbacks could arise if Enstrom’s caramel was not given as a Christmas gift. Handing out boxes of caramel is a decades-old tradition for many Enstrom customers.

“We are the gift people are waiting for,” he said. “If you don’t give Enstrom caramel, people ask you, ‘Don’t you like me anymore?’ » »

Amy Genrich agrees with this.

“The people I give it to have to have it,” she said. “It would be difficult to try to give anything else.”

Story Type: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the journalist or reported and verified by knowledgeable sources.