Loop Back: Assorted Chocolates
For more than 50 years, mouth-watering chocolates and other sweets rolled off the production lines of this candy factory at 900 North 3rd Street.
Built by the Gurley Candy Company of Minneapolis in 1919, it was best known for producing boxed assortments of chocolate-covered cherries, nuts and nougats known as Hidden Treasures. Gurley also produced lemon drops, chocolate mints and an oversized 10-cent candy bar known as Big Liz (see images at the bottom of this post).
Fanny Farmer bought the company in 1936 and grew the operations to the point that this facility could hardly keep up with demand. It expanded the building in 1948 and 1950, increasing its production space by 40%. By that time, a newspaper article noted that this plant was producing 125 different lines of candy for stores in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas.
It was also one of the biggest buyers of dairy products from Minnesota’s farmers. A 1948 article in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune mentioned that the Fanny Farmer factory used 3,000 pounds of butter a week and 500 gallons of cream a day to make its candies.
It closed in the summer of 1972 when the company decided to shift production to a facility in Ohio.
Please visit the Historic North Loop section of this website for many more fun photos and articles about our neighborhood’s history.
By Mike Binkley, North Loop volunteer*
(*not an actual historian; I just pulled together information from newspaper archives, public records, online searches and most helpfully, the digital archives at the Hennepin County Library)
