Thread: next time you pick up a butterfinger bar look closely

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size 1 bar (60 g)
Servings per Container 1

Amount Per Serving
Calories 270 Calories from Fat 100

% Daily Value*
Total Fat 11 g 17%
Saturated Fat 6 g 28%
Trans Fat 0 g
Cholesterol 0 mg 0%
Sodium 135 mg 6%
Total Carbohydrate 43 g 14%
Dietary Fiber 1 g 4%
Sugars 29 g
Protein 4 g
Vitamin A 0% * Vitamin C 0%
Calcium 2% * Iron 2%

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http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-C00001-01c21Op.html

We have lots of those up here in Oregon Bearflagrepublic!!! In fact, it is apple season here soon and I plan to make a trip up to Hood River soon, Mmmmm..........fresh pressed apple cider, cold!!!!

Fascinating facts about the invention
of the candy bar by Joseph Fry in 1847.
CANDY BAR
AT A GLANCE:

In 1847, Joseph Fry discovered a way to mix some melted cacao butter back into defatted, or "Dutched," cocoa powder (along with sugar) to create a paste that could be pressed into a mold. The resulting bar was such a hit that people soon began to think of eating chocolate as much as drinking it. Many people credit this as the very first chocolate bar for eating.

Invention: candy bar in 1847

Function: noun / can·dy bar

Definition: A confection made with sugar and often flavoring and filling with a shape that is longer than it is wide. Candy bars made with milk chocolate are the most popular

Patent: Various candy making machines have been patented

Inventor: Joseph Fry
Criteria: First to invent. Entrepreneur.
Birth: 1795
Death: 1879
Nationality: British

Milestones:
250 Mayan society's elite consume a chocolate drink made from Cacao beans
1375 Aztec society use cacao beans as currency and as a beverage
1529 a Chocolate drink is introduced into Spain from the Americas by conquistador Hernando Cortez
1729 Walter Churchman granted Letters Patent by George II for chocolate making
1847 Joseph Fry & Son, creates a paste that could be pressed into a mold, resulting in bar candy
1849 John Cadbury introduces a chocolaye candy bar
1875 Milk Chocolate invented by Henry Nestle and Daniel Peter
1879 Rodolphe Lindt creates a bar that "snaps" when broken as well as melting on the tongue.
1900 Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar was invented
1916 Clark bar invented
1919 Joseph Fry & Sons of Bristol, merged with Cadbury Limited
1923 Reese's Peanut Butter Cups was invented
1923 Butterfinger was invented
1923 Milky Way invented
1925 Kandy Kake (the original name of the Baby Ruth),
1925 Oh Henry! invented
1925 Mr. Goodbar invented
1930 Snickers Bar was invented .
1932 3 Musketeers Bar was invented
1933 Kit Kat was invented
1938 Nestle's Crunch was invented
candy bar, chocolate bar, milk chocolate bar, joseph fry, fry, cadbury, lindt, hershey, invention, history, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts.

The Story:
Chocolate, as a Drink, was a favorite of Montezuma, Emperor of the Aztecs. Hernando Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, brought the drink back to Spain in 1529. It remained a favorite of the Spanish royalty for many years before becoming consumed widely throughout Europe. Three centuries later in England chocolate was first used as a non-liquid confection.
The inventor of 'chocolate for eating' is unknown, but in 1847, Joseph Fry & Son -- under the leadership of the original Joseph Fry's great-grandson -- discovered a way to mix some of the melted cacao butter back into defatted, or "Dutched," cocoa powder (along with sugar) to create a paste that could be pressed into a mold. The resulting bar was such a hit that people soon began to think of eating chocolate as much as drinking it. Many people credit this as the very first chocolate bar for eating.

John Cadbury added a similar product to his range in 1849, and by today's standards these original chocolate bars would not be considered very palatable. The early eating bars of chocolate were made of bittersweet chocolate. Milk chocolate was introduced in 1875 when Henry Nestle, a maker of evaporated milk and Daniel Peter, a chocolate maker, got together and invented milk chocolate.

In 1879, Rodolphe Lindt thought to add cocoa butter back to the chocolate. Adding the additional cocoa butter helped the chocolate set up into a bar that "snaps" when broken as well as melting on the tongue.

At the 1893 Columbian Exposition, a World's Fair held in Chicago, chocolate-making machinery made in Dresden, Germany, was displayed. It caught the eye of Milton S. Hershey, who had made his fortune in caramels, saw the potential for chocolate. He installed chocolate machinery in his factory in Lancaster, and produced his first chocolate bars in 1900.

Other Americans began mixing in other ingredients to make up new candy bars throughout the end of the 1890's and the early 1900's. But it was World War I that really brought attention to the candy bar. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps commissioned various American chocolate manufacturers to provide 20 to 40 pound blocks of chocolate to be shipped to quartermaster bases. The blocks were chopped up into smaller pieces and distributed to doughboys in Europe.

Eventually the task of making smaller pieces was turned back to the manufacturers. By the end of the war the returning doughboys had grown fond of chocolate candy and now as civilians wanted more of the same. As a result, from that time on and through the 1920s, candy bar manufacturers became established througout the United States, and as many as 40,000 different candy bars appeared on the scene. The Twenties became the decade that among other things, was the high point of the candy bar industry.

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inven ... ndybar.htm

I drive through Luling Texas occasionally. They are big on watermelons, which I love. Their water tower is even painted like a watermelon. However the only watermelon stand on 183 has a Mexican flag. I would never stop there.

That was very interesting, thanks "Skip" I am a chocoholic and SEE'S is my all time favorite!! I even say in my prayers please do not move to Mexico!! because boycott I would, as much as I would hate to give it up I would have to principle you know!

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ALIPAC AUGUST FUND RAISER
PLEASE help ALIPAC stay in the fight against illegal immigration!!!!
http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=F ... ic&t=75673
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT ALIPAC???

PM's bonbon bon mot glazes over sticky economic issues

Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service

Published: Friday, August 24, 2007

It was a truly sweet sound bite.

Wrapping up last week's Three Amigos meeting of North American leaders near Ottawa, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a summit show-stopper on the regulatory travails of a frustrated Canadian candy maker trying -- with apparent difficulty -- to sell his jelly beans to the United States.

"You know, we had some business leaders in front of us today. One in particular said... the rules for jelly bean contents are different in Canada and the United States -- they have to maintain two separate inventories," Harper told a throng of reporters as he wove toward his delicious punch line.

"Is the sovereignty of Canada going to fall apart if we standardize the jelly bean?"
The killer quote came after two days of talks with U.S. President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon to affirm the three countries' controversial Security and Prosperity Partnership.

The grab-bag trilateral accord, condemned by critics as an integration-by-stealth blueprint for continental union, is aimed at harmonizing trade rules, border policies, anti-terrorism strategies and -- jelly beans?

Cue the cameras and cartoonists.

With one devastatingly digestible example of regulation run amok, Harper had seemingly disarmed the SPP's foes and made all the fuss of a tear-gas clash with protestors and wild claims about the surrender of Canada's soul seem, in the prime minister's own phrasing, "sad."

But the real story behind Harper's jelly bean zinger is more complex and weighty -- and less politically convenient -- than he let on.

Inspired by a brief presentation to the three leaders earlier in the day from David Ganong, president of a much-loved New Brunswick candy company and one of 30 chief executives invited to the summit as business advisers, Harper's call to "standardize the jelly bean" was really about product labelling rules, not the actual ingredients of the iconic confection. And labelling does, in fact, raise issues "integral" to Canadian sovereignty -- or so says one of the government's own guidelines for negotiating the SPP.

Harper's remark does shed light on the thicket of picayune rules and standards that can plague cross-border commerce. But it also obscures the other harsh realities of doing business in Canada, which no amount of regulatory tinkering or even radical reform will solve, and which have already decimated Ganong's jelly bean exports.

"You can buy them from Mexico for less than our factory costs," Ganong himself admitted a year ago, in a quote that wouldn't have played quite so well at this week's summit.

What's more, the PM's witty one-liner has shone a global spotlight on a family firm whose success has grown in part on a steady diet of cash from a contentious federal business fund - one that Harper, back when he could only dream of upstaging the U.S. president, live on CNN, with a wisecrack about jelly beans, routinely denounced as the country's richest source of "corporate welfare."

David Ganong, the 62-year-old head of his family's five-generation-old chocolate and candy company -- a venerable Maritimes institution based in the New Brunswick-Maine border town of St. Stephen -- admits the attention generated by Harper's jelly bean bon mot has been "more than I bargained for." But he understands because "people can relate to it."

Ganong explained how nutrition labels mandated by both Canadian and American food regulators force him to create different packages for each market.

Under U.S. rules for formatting the rectangular chart that details fat and carbohydrate levels, vitamin content and so on, "the lines are a different thickness" than those for the Canadian box, Ganong notes with exasperation. "The layout is slightly different."

American protocol demands that 32 grams of sugar be shown as "32g," while Canadian regulators require a space between the amount and the "g," requiring it be written "32 g."

Leave out the space or make the lines too skinny and, in Canada, "those are all infractions. And it has nothing to do with food safety."

Ganong earnestly and persuasively advocates an end to such "frivolous" inconsistencies between U.S. and Canadian rules. But he acknowledges there are other, thornier labelling issues that could make it difficult to manufacture identical food packages for both countries.

For instance, the two countries have different views on the health claims that food retailers can make for their products. And nutrition standards vary enough that three of Ganong's Delecto chocolates will give you four per cent of your daily iron requirements in Canada but only two per cent in the States.

"American and Canadian consumers are essentially the same consumers," insists Ganong, wondering why science doesn't get its act together to standardize North Americans' nutrition needs.

But he concedes that even if he overcame all the other hurdles preventing his company from producing a single package for selling jelly beans in Canada and the U.S., his American customers would have to get used to seeing the phrase "feves a la gelee" as big as "jelly beans" on the front of the bag, and "valeur nutritive" as big as "nutrition facts" on the back.

That's because Canada will never drop the requirement that French wording appear along with, and equal to, any English wording on a product package.

"Canadian regulations reflect policy preferences, which can differ from those of American counterparts and complicate the potential for regulatory convergence," says a key federal government document, which set the stage for the harmonizing regulations under the SPP. Published in December 2004, the report, entitled Canada-U.S. Regulatory Co-operation: Charting a Path Forward, notes: "For example, the federal government's commitment to bilingualism is integral to life in Canada, and this makes complete harmonization impossible in a number of areas, especially labelling requirements."

Ganong accepts the French fact when it comes to packaging.

"First of all, it's an absolute requirement in Canada, and it's an even more absolute requirement in Quebec," he says. "To market your products in Canada, you have no choice."

But could jelly beans with bilingual phrasing -- English-French, that is, not English-Spanish - be a hit in the U.S.?

"It's not illegal," Ganong says. "It can be an impediment, but it doesn't necessarily have to restrict you from doing business in the United States. In an ideal world, (a single) language is better. But we're not living in an ideal world."

In fact, Ganong has been selling some of its jelly beans in the U.S. in bilingual bags - with an English-only nutritional label, conforming to American rules, hand-stuck on top of the Canadian one.

"We don't like to do it that way, but we have done it," Ganong says. "You try to avoid that, but we have marketed bilingual products in the States. And if the other labelling (issues) would be solved, we would, in all probability, in many of our products, endeavour to market a bilingual package."

As it happens, Ganong's bid to become a major continental player in the jelly bean business has all but collapsed anyway, and not because of the regulatory wrinkles for which the company is momentarily famous.

"We're probably doing something in the area of a fifth as much as we did two years ago." Ganong said. "The industry that we're in has gone through a very difficult time, being driven by the dollar."

Ganong's beans have gone bust in the U.S. due to the rising price of oil, the soaring value of the loonie and the comparatively low production costs in countries such as Brazil and Mexico - Canada's SPP partner and a major jelly bean producer.

"Oil prices went up, the Canadian dollar went up. Sugar and corn syrup are the two major ingredients used in making the jelly bean," adds Ganong, "and both of them, because they are convertible to ethanol, followed the (oil) price up. You ended up where you had a glut of capacity in the Canadian marketplace."

In the end, he says, Canada's four major jelly bean makers have lost "probably tens of millions of pounds" of sales, but it has nothing to do with labelling.

Even so, Ganong remains one of Atlantic Canada's showcase companies -- its chocolates, fruit jellies and other sweets still racking up impressive global sales.

David Ganong, too, ranks among the corporate stars and leading philanthropists from the Maritimes. The New Brunswick boy who took the family firm global without cutting its roots in the province is a revered figure, chairman of University of New Brunswick's board of governors and the province's business council.

But his appointment by Harper to the SPP's panel of corporate advisers could qualify as ironic.

Ganong has said many times that his company's achievements wouldn't have been possible without the millions of dollars in interest-free loans and other payouts of public money from a federal economic development fund that Harper helped make his name by attacking.

Just three years ago, when Harper was an opposition leader slamming the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as a symbol of "corporate welfare," and Ganong was praising another million-dollar ACOA investment as "instrumental" to his company's success, it would have been hard to imagine them sharing a stage with the U.S. president, and riffing for the world's media on jelly bean regulations.

"For us, ACOA has helped provide some of the capital that is above and beyond what we're able to raise through the normal banking commercial system," Ganong said in February 2004, a few months before the agency pledged to give Ganong a $1-million, interest-free loan for new candy-making equipment and another $99,999 grant for skills development.

A "forgivable loan" of $300,000 from the provincial government was announced at the same time.

"Clearly, ACOA and the province of New Brunswick have played a major role in helping us to grow and reduce costs," Ganong declared at a press conference, "which is necessary to our future and to maintaining our position in Canada."

Meanwhile, Harper, in his first election campaign as Conservative leader, was assaulting ACOA and other public funding bodies for business.

"We will only reduce business and corporate taxes further to the extent that we can reduce corporate welfare over the next term," he said in one speech, just a month before Ganong received its latest ACOA subsidies.

"It was an NDP leader, David Lewis, who coined the term corporate welfare bums in 1972. Unfortunately, in the past 30 years, too many corporations have been drawn into this trap by the available plethora of government loans, grants, and subsidies," Harper went on, pledging that any federal government run by him would "get out of the grants and subsidies game" -- a stance softened since his 2006 election as prime minister.

Ganong says today that subsidies from ACOA and other government funds have "diminished gigantically" in recent years and that companies like his are competing with only "nominal" help from taxpayers.

Still, he argues there should be "no fear" of Canada being compelled to scrap its regional economic development programs as part of the SPP effort to harmonize continental commerce. Especially, he adds, when Canadian subsidies are "minuscule" compared to the ways U.S. jurisdictions prop up some industries.

But that's another issue. It's one of many sticky subjects lost in the gloss of the Jelly Bean Summit, an event history will likely remember only for a candy merchant's crusade against government red tape and a prime minister's sweet tooth for a spin.

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/polit ... 53d&k=6119