NEWMARKET—Take a whiff of heaven.

It’s faintly sweet, with hints of orange-cream, pineapple, cherry, strawberry, grape and orange. Just like the bottom of your Halloween trick-or-treat bag where the actual candy lurks under the chocolate bars and chips.

The air in this factory is downright hazy, from a “flavour and colour mix” spun with dextrose and pressed into candy tablets.

The people — workers dressed in white and grey uniforms, gloves and hairnets — seem blissed out and almost otherworldly.

“This is candy utopia,” declares Liz Dee. “It’s candy heaven.”

This is actually Rockets Candy Co., where they make the Rockets candy you will surely eat for Halloween. Liz Dee is the 30-year-old vice-president and co-owner, as well as the founder’s granddaughter.

Candy companies are notoriously secretive. It took much negotiation to land this rare tour. There are ground rules.

Don’t photograph proprietary equipment. Don’t wander off. Don’t give away company secrets. Don’t shoot video.

Agreed.

Before we begin, a little background.

This company was launched in 1949 as Ce De Candy Co. after third-generation candymaker Edward “Eddie” Dee moved his family from England to New Jersey and secured the name Smarties for his candy wafer roll. His family had been making a similar candy in England at what’s now the Swizzels Matlow Co.

In 1963, Dee expanded to Canada, opening a second factory on Queen St. W. in Toronto. The candy was called Rockets here to avoid confusion with Nestle’s colourful sugar-coated chocolate Smarties.

“I think the name Rockets had something to do with the idea of space, which was so compelling for everyone,” says Dee.

The factory moved to Newmarket in 1988. The original space is now the Candy Factory Lofts. Ce De Candy is now Smarties Candy Co., but is still known here as Rockets Candy Co.

Got all that? Now come inside the 130,000-square-foot factory for a tour with Liz Dee, a fifth-generation candy maker, and plant manager Andrew Kam, a second-generation Rockets employee.

It’s August and the plant is churning out Halloween candy. It runs 20 hours a day from Monday to Friday, shutting down from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and during breaks and lunch. There are 95 employees, more in the summer.

This factory makes all kinds of Rockets — original, giant, tropical, sour and Rockets Love Hearts with messages like “Be Mine” and “You Only.” (Sadly, Love Hearts are being phased out.) Rockets powder is also used for lollipops — Double Lollies, Super Double Lollies and Mega Lollies.

Let’s start on the main floor in the pre-mix room where small batches of candy flavours/colours are mixed by hand. Exactly how is “top secret — an under lock-and-key formula.”

Next stop is the mix room where the pre-mix is “spun together” with dextrose, a corn sugar. The completed mix, a powder, is put in bins and sent upstairs to the mezzanine on a freight elevator.

The mezzanine is a sun-splashed and serene waiting room.

Let’s focus on Rockets. There are 15 tablets in a regular pack. Every packet is different because the colour/flavour mix is random.

“That’s kinda the magic,” admits Dee.

Up here, the candy scent is pure and strong.

“We’re immune to the smell,” offers Kam, who worked summers at the Queen St. factory as a teenager and joined the company full-time in 1994, following in the footsteps of his now-retired father.

“All my friends call me at Halloween for candy asking, ‘Can I get a discount? Can I get a tour? How do you make that lollipop?’”

There are no public tours, but employees do get 15 pounds of candy for Halloween.

Anyway, the candy powder is gravity-fed back downstairs to the tablet room when it’s time to make Rockets.

“We can do six pounds a minute and there are 910 tablets per pound so that’s about 5,400 tablets per minute,” explains Kam. “Times 60 machines so that’s almost 300,000 tablets an hour.”

It’s a dazzling number, but how exactly does a powder become a tablet? Let’s just say it’s done by pressure and move on.

The tablets go back up to the mezzanine to wait until it’s time for wrapping, then get gravity-fed back downstairs to the super-sensitive wrapping room.

This is where Rockets get randomly sorted and twist-wrapped in clear plastic wrappers.

“We have a whole new fleet of machines,” says Dee. “They can wrap 250 a minute versus 120 a minute.”

The technology is “completely proprietary and took years and years” to develop. The fast machines go “boom, boom, boom” while the “old-school, vintage machines” merrily chug along.

“It’s exciting stuff for us candy makers,” enthuses Dee. “I’m sure it’s boring for you. We could talk about machines all day.”

The process for making lollipops, by the way, is the same. Same candy, different shape, different wrapping room.

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Red Rockets, by the way, taste like cherry. Blue is grape, orange is orange, yellow is pineapple, green is strawberry and white is orange-cream.

They haven’t done any official studies, but anecdotally, orange-cream is the fan favourite.

“I like the green one best,” offers Kam.

“I like the green one, too,” agrees Dee.

The final step on the Rockets journey is the packing room where the candy is weighed and bagged. Robots pack everything into cartons

“The robots are very exciting,” Dee says. “You are now 30 to 40 years in the future.”

The heavenly candy smell is finally gone, replaced with the surprisingly woodsy (Canadian?) smell of fresh cardboard boxes.

There’s one other room worth mentioning. It produces peppermint and spearmint Breath Savers. It’s completely separate because of the intense liquid mint flavour.

“We don’t want our Rockets smelling or tasting like mint,” explains Dee.

Mix. Press. Wrap. Bag. Pack. The story of Rockets in five words.

The candy is made the exact same way in the company’s Union, New Jersey factory. The U.S. factory is smaller but serves as head office and has more staff. Founder Eddie Dee, now 89, has an office and makes regular appearances. Two of his sons and three of his granddaughters run the company.

“I like to say I work in candyland,” says Liz Dee, who actually wrote her master’s thesis on candy culture.

She is vegan and proud to announce that Rockets are vegan, too, since they’re made from glucose powder. (Many sugars are processed with animal bone char to help turn them white.)

She’s a reformed Rocketholic. “I used to eat our candy almost every day. Now I rarely eat it unless we’re taste-testing. Now it’s work.”

It’s fascinating to hear how people eat their Rockets. Most eat them one by one, by colour. Some nibble them. Others patiently let them dissolve. Some press the wrapper to their mouths and “shove everything in.”

Ah, that unmistakable sound of the crinkly Rockets wrapper.

No matter how you eat your candy, chances are you created an “incredible bond” with it very early in life — especially at Halloween. “A huge event in people’s candy experiences,” says Dee.

You eat your Halloween candy, trade it, hoard it, hide it, or sometimes pine for it if your parents seize it.

You eventually grow up, but hopefully your favourite candy stays exactly the same.

“That’s paramount — consistency,” says Dee. “We do not mess with what works. We want people to have the same experience. Not a slightly different experience.”

Long live Rockets.

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