CREDIT: Photographs by Christopher Payne
Walk into the gift shop in Spangler Candy s factory and you ll find several displays that highlight the various confections Coconut Balls, Creme Peanut Clusters the company has launched and retired over the years. It s what CEO Kirk Vashaw lovingly refers to as a museum of failures. But that s quite all right. You can have product lines that fail, he says. You just have to know when to let things go.
Vashaw, a member of the fourth generation of the Spangler family to run the company, has been at the helm since 2011. He s the latest in the family to understand that, despite the failures, candy is a long-tail business. There might be no better example than Spangler s own Circus Peanuts, the strange, chewy combination of peanut shape, marshmallowy texture, and banana flavor that the company has been making for eight decades.