By Robert Allen
Detroit Free Press
DETROIT (AP) - You can still see the signs for Sydney Bogg Chocolates outside a worn, idle brick building on Woodward near 7 Mile in Detroit.
Under a bright, red awning is the outline of a man stirring a kettle, with promises of "chocolates," "party candy" and "roasted nuts." A lightbulb-lined candy cane still hangs - one side faded to white - from the facade along Woodward. Inside, the aromas of melting chocolate and caramel popcorn, along with the equipment that made them, are long gone.
Founded in 1936, this Detroit candy factory once had four stores across metro Detroit. It went out of business 15 years ago.
Three longtime employees had started working there as teenagers. By the time Sydney Bogg closed, they were in their 40s, and they were experts. One at cooking, another in creating elaborate designs with icing, and the other at hand-dipping morsels in chocolate.
Debbie Schlicker, the icing designer, received a call on her cellphone shortly after the closure. A Sydney Bogg customer had tracked her down.
"This woman begged me, 'Please, nobody does this. My daughter's getting married. ... I'll get you whatever you need - please, won't you do my daughter's wedding?'" said Schlicker, now 58.
Using the kitchen of her Madison Heights home, she and her husband, Gary, (the cook) made barks, chocolates and her signature nonpareils - small, flat, round candies, each of which included the bride and groom's names spelled in icing. More people found out. And soon, the Schlickers were making 70-pound batches of candy on their home stove top.
"I got a big order for chocolate-covered Oreos that I couldn't do myself; it was like 1,000 Oreos," Schlicker said. "So I'm trying to dip, and I call my sister (the dipper) up. ... We're sitting there and we've got bowls of chocolate right in front of us, and she's dipping these Oreos and she's going, 'Deb, this is illegal. We can't do this. We need to get a building.'"
Today, those three employees - Gary, 57, and Debbie Schlicker, and her sister, Lisa Peasley, 55 - are cranking out candy as the co-owners of Sydney Bogg's Sweet Essentials in Berkley, the Detroit Free Press reported. December is peak season at the growing business, and the shelves are loaded with chocolates, truffles, caramel-covered popcorn and more.
When she was 12, Clare Szymanski tried her first cinnamon-hot jawbreaker from Sydney Bogg's in Detroit. She remembers skipping class in high school and pooling money with friends to make runs to the candy store.
Now 53, she regularly drives from Rochester Hills to Berkley so she can buy chocolates, caramels, nonpareils and chocolate-covered graham crackers.
"They're just as good," she said. "They're the same."
Not only are they made by the same people using the same recipes, but much of the same equipment is involved: When Debbie Schlicker went to collect personal items from the Detroit location, she found the door padlocked. But later, a friend saw movement in the building. Schlicker went down there and found that the Truan's Candies owner, Mark Truan, had purchased the building's contents.
"I said, 'Can I get my pictures of my kids out of here?' He said, 'Aren't you going to buy anything?'" Schlicker said. "I got on my phone with my sister and said, 'Get your credit card.'"
Among the items were a fire mixer from about 1912, a cream beater from 1901 and a caramel cutter from roughly 1872, Peasley said.
"We're absolutely thrilled to be carrying on the Sydney Bogg tradition," she said. "We have the job every kid dreams of, right?"
Even Sydney Bogg's daughter approves.
"I am so thankful for Debbie, Lisa and Gary for using the same recipes that I typed out on little 5-by-8 cards," said Joyce Thewalt, 78, adding that she remembers using a manual typewriter in the 1950s to record recipes. "They believe in the quality of the candy."
Sydney Bogg was born in 1904 in England and arrived in Detroit in the 1920s. He started working at a refrigerator company. But he wanted to learn how candy was made, so he apprenticed under Howard Vair, owner of Vair-E-Best, a candy factory in Highland Park.
Bogg started making candy and selling it, at night, on city buses, Thewalt said in his obituary the Free Press published Feb. 11, 1988. Bogg's candy store opened during the Great Depression (1929-1939), and Debbie Schlicker said Bogg would offer candy one piece at a time, so people could afford some sweet comfort food.
Thewalt said that when she was a child, her family lived in a flat above the Woodward candy factory. During World War II, food rationing limited the amount of sugar and butter available, and she remembers taping up a sign that said "Peanut brittle, 1/2 pound (per person), ready at 3 p.m.," and people would line up to buy it.
"In the late '40s at Halloween, if you would bring an apple to the back door of the candy store, Mr. Bogg would give you a candied one," Thewalt said.
Her mother decorated the storefront for the seasons. Before Christmas, there would be a 50-pound, chocolate Santa Claus in the window, surrounded by hanging candy canes.
Through the years, the original Sydney Bogg factory expanded into neighboring units, taking over space previously used by a cemetery headstone maker and a hardware store.
Ralph Skidmore, a former employee who, like the Schlickers, met his spouse at the candy store, purchased the business in 1969. By the mid-1980s, the factory employed about 60 people. Easter was a big holiday, when they would churn out 16 tons of chocolate bunny rabbits, from three-quarter-ounce miniatures for 15 cents to a 75-pound beast for $250, the Free Press reported on March 26, 1986.
"And they will have made 4,000 Easter baskets and untold thousands of chocolate eggs, nutty butter-corn chunks, and chocolate and pecan caramel turtles," according to the article headlined, "Work is sweet on the chocolate bunny trail."
Beyond the factory in Detroit, Sydney Bogg expanded to stores at Great Oaks Mall in Rochester, Holiday Market Center in Royal Oak and Village Knoll Mall in Birmingham.
Former Free Press publisher Neal Shine listed "two 1-lb. bags (formerly three 1-lb bags) of Nutty Buttered Corn from Sydney Bogg" among his "incriminating items available to me in moments of dietary weakness" in a column Jan. 11, 1990. And former Free Press columnist Bob Talbert called Sydney Bogg's chocolate turtlettes (a name used because "Turtles" is trademarked) "the best I ever had" in a piece on July 2, 1997.
Debbie Schlicker said the business changed hands again in the 1990s before it went bankrupt in 2002, causing a number of orders to go unfilled. Thewalt of Grand Blanc said the Detroit location in its later years appeared to have focused more on gift cards and toys, and she thinks the candy's quality suffered, hastening the business' demise.
Detroit in the mid-20th Century had numerous local chocolatiers and candy shops, such as Sanders and Henry-K Chocolates, and most no longer operate storefronts in the city. But the concept, in somewhat the same trendy vein as local craft breweries and farm-to-table restaurants, appears ripe for a comeback.
Bon Bon Bon opened a shop in downtown Detroit in 2015, offering artisanal treats made in Hamtramck. It was featured in Food & Wine, and founder Alexandra (Alex) Clark was featured in Forbes magazine's 30 under 30 last year. The Free Press reported this month that former Ford Field Executive Chef Joe Nader and his business partners have plans to open a chocolate bon bon storefront in Detroit. Today's Sydney Bogg
The Sydney Bogg's Sweet Essentials in Berkley, with about seven employees, is much smaller than the Detroit factory. Family members help pitch in during crunch time - such as December, when there's a surge in orders.
"When everything is handmade, and you get orders for 100 of this or 120 of that, then it's like, 'Oh boy, it's time to work,'" Peasley said as she made dipped truffles and funneled out nonpareils the morning of Dec. 5, in a room visible through a large window facing 12 Mile.
In the next room, Gary Schlicker heated up the fire mixer to make Nutty Buttered Corn in a big, copper kettle. Light and brown sugar, and butter, were among the ingredients he stirred up before adding nuts and popcorn.
"This is a high-grade candy," he said, adding that he hopes to one day see the Nutty Buttered Corn sold at Detroit Tigers games.
On-site, the Berkley shop makes caramel, marshmallow, nougats, creams and more. The chocolate comes in huge, 10-pound bars from Peter's Chocolate. Peasley breaks them apart with a knife and drops into a tempering machine, which melts and smooths the chocolate into a velvety liquid.
The Detroit location also used Peter's Chocolate. That company was founded by Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter, who's credited with inventing the first successful milk chocolate by the 1880s, according to What's Cooking America and Nestlé.com.
Szymanski said the "pureness of the chocolate" keeps her coming back.
"It's like a prescription: You need it because it makes you feel better," she said. "My sister would text me and say, 'Where are you at?' and I'd say, 'I'm at Dr. Bogg's, I'm just picking up a script.' There's no Dr. Bogg, that's just what we call him."
Peasley said the business is growing, with about a 10 percent increase in orders per year. They've been there 12 years.
Recently, they visited the old Detroit building to see about moving back. But Peasley said they would have had to put too much money into improvements.
Thewalt said that when she walks into the Berkley store, they say, "Here comes the royalty."
On the walls, among stacks of chocolate boxes with gold ribbons, are pictures of Sydney Bogg and others connected to the candymaker.
"It smells just like my dad's store," Thewalt said. "It smells just like chocolate and vanilla."
Published: Thu, Jan 04, 2018
