Sweet Surroundings

By David Weldon

At age 160, the New England Confectionary Company http://www.necco.com/ (NECCO) is the oldest multi-line candy company in the United States. It is also one of the newest.

Four years ago, the popular candy manufacturer relocated its antiquated facilities, consolidated its operations, embraced lean manufacturing practices, and re-emerged as a state-of-the-art production facility that is now a showroom for ultra modern processing perfection.

It was a move that turned out to be one sweet deal.

"We have a lot more capability and more capacity," says Bill Leva, vice president of operations at NECCO. "We also have better working conditions, better work flow, less product handling, and our cycle times to the customer are better."

In short, everything about the move paid off in spades, Leva says.

The move, and the lessons that the company has learned since, also provide a textbook example of how a long-standing manufacturer can make what is old new again, and do so without sacrificing quality, slowing sales or missing a day on the production floor.

Launching the candy trade

Now located in the North Shore city of Revere, Massachusetts, just a few minutes from the city of Boston, NECCO was established in 1847 by Oliver R. and Silas Edwin Chase of Boston. Oliver had just invented and patented the first American candy machine, a lozenge cutter, and with it, the two set about establishing the first commercial candy manufacturing company.

Over the next several years, the company rapidly patented a number of new inventions, introduced a number of new candy lines, and acquired various other businesses along the way.

By 1927, the company had grown to the point that it moved from Boston across the Charles River to Cambridge, and settled into a new production facility near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The then-new facility, designed in the shape of a letter H, was considered to be state-of-the for its time, and was built to welcome in as much sunlight and air as possible. With the entire facility devoted to candy making, it was also the largest such facility in the world.

But times change. So do technologies. And what had been a progressive layout 80 years ago had become