Never tried Enstrom’s toffee? You’re missing out on a nearly century-long Colorado holiday tradition.

GRAND JUNCTION — Ray and Amy Genrich clutched a basket filled with Christmas-wrapped boxes as they inched in the line toward the checkout counter at Enstrom Candies.

“Colorado crack. That’s what we call it,” Amy said, nodding at the boxes. “Our friends from Florida get so excited when we bring them the real thing.”

“Colorado crack” is the buttery, nutty, chocolatey confection four generations of Enstrom family members have made for nearly a century.

The “real thing” is toffee purchased at the Enstrom mothership in downtown Grand Junction. The Enstrom retail store is where shoppers can watch through a glass wall as hair- and beard-netted candy makers heat, spread, slather and sprinkle the simple ingredients that are the essence of the famous Enstrom toffee.

Enstrom candy makers now produce half a million pounds of hand-made toffee annually. That’s a whopping 1.2 million calories — a number that people navigating the towers of toffee boxes in the Enstrom store appear willing to ignore around the holidays.

“We are a tradition. We aren’t just a candy,” said Enstrom vice president of sales Jim Simmons, representing the latest generation of the Enstrom family to take up the sweet business of running a company their great-grandfather Chet Enstrom started in 1929.

In the past decade with 38-year-old Jim and his 40-year-old brother Doug Simmons Jr. at the helm, Enstrom Candies has continued to move well beyond the handmade toffee that made the company famous. Enstrom Candies also turns out another 50,000 pounds or so of handmade bonbons and chocolate novelties each year. The shelves and coolers at the Enstrom shop include toffee popcorn, toffee bits for baking, sugar-free toffee, chocolate holiday ornaments, mint bark, 50 rotating varieties of ice cream, and tubs and boxes of bite-sized chunks of toffee called petites. 

The company’s biggest growth shift has taken place in the back production area of Enstrom’s city block-sized home base where those petites are being made. There, machines crank out an additional 2.5 million pounds of chocolate-enrobed toffee squares that have enabled Enstrom’s to spread its sweets around the world in the past several years.  

“It’s a necessary evil,” said Jim of the decision to add machine-made toffee to the company’s sugary repertoire.

Enstrom sells the machine-made toffee in individually wrapped chunks to large retailers. Some put their own brand on it. Others opt to go with a name that has cachet in the toffee world. Enstrom-brand toffee is now sold in the aisles of Costco, in well-manicured hands on the QVC network, in five-starred Amazon listings and from grocery store coolers.

That toffee is the same recipe as Chet’s original, but it has an attribute that the original doesn’t: It is shelf stable. Because it is entirely enrobed in chocolate, the butter in the toffee can’t oxidize like it can in the handmade slabs that are only coated in chocolate top and bottom.

Jim said his family was able to add the shelf-stable toffee after hiring a candy consultant who came up with the method of continuing to use the all-important butter that is a prime ingredient in the toffee but using protective chocolate, so it doesn’t need to be refrigerated or frozen.

Dry climate, elevation are tricks of the toffee trade

The additions to the toffee that makes up 95% of Enstrom’s sales, allow the company to keep 270 employees busy year around rather than for the three to four months it takes to produce what Jim calls the direct-to-consumer side of the business — the handmade toffee that is only available in Enstrom shops.

Enstrom Candies is producing enough of the toffee — both hand- and machine-made — to warrant an expansion. The family recently broke ground on a new 50,000-square-foot building that will house a warehouse, a distribution center and office spaces. It will enable Enstrom toffee to have even more of a global footprint.

Jim said Enstrom Candies is in final talks with a Japanese company that is expecting to begin selling Enstrom toffee on a large scale next year.

But the company’s expansion will not include making the toffee outside Colorado. He described toffee as akin to wine in the way that it is affected by geography.

“Cooking at altitude is a secret to our confections. The effect of altitude and the dry climate are tricks of our trade,” Jim said.

Enstrom Candies has survived in a dry western Colorado climate since the Depression era when a craving for sweets seemed to outpace economic woes. Chet Enstrom opened his initial ice cream shop two months before the stock market crash. He had to pivot to keep the enterprise afloat. He completed a mail-order refrigeration class and became a repairman for businesses with coolers that were on the fritz.

Chet added toffee to his ice cream sales during World War II when housewives donated their allotments of butter and sugar to him so that he could make toffee and send it to their family members who were serving in the military overseas.

Other candy companies also survived the tough Depression era and economy-tipping wars.

Russell Stover Candies began producing hand-dipped chocolates in Denver in 1923 and remained a Colorado-owned confection business until a decade ago. Its large Montrose plant shut down in 2020 after the Swiss chocolatier Lindt & Sprungli bought the company in 2014.

Hammond’s Candies started building a confectionery empire in Denver in 1920 with an initial sweet offering of Carl’s Piggy Backs, a chocolate mound topped with shredded coconut. It has repeatedly expanded and remained a Colorado-based business since then.

Enstrom, Hammond’s, and Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory are now Colorado’s premiere confectioners.

Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory didn’t come on the scene until 1981 when it opened its first store in Durango and built a Durango factory a year later. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory now has 323 franchises around the world. Twenty-six of those are in Colorado.

Chet Enstrom’s toffee recipe is unchanged

Enstrom opted through the years to keep its business in the family mode. Except for Chet’s original partner in the ice cream shop, Harry Jones, the Enstrom family has kept the operation in familial hands even when politics might have interfered.

In 1964, Chet was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Colorado legislature. He and his wife, Vernie, turned the business over to their son Emil and daughter-in-law Mary. Emil and Mary grew the business to include mail-order customers.

By 1979 there were 10,000 of those customers on the books when their daughter, Jaimee, and her husband, Doug Simmons, took the business over.

The candy company they inherited included an office with a din of clacking typewriters as orders were filled for customers whose names were kept on Rolodex cards. Each order had to be individually hand typed.

Jaimee and Doug computerized the business. This season, there are about 30 customer service specialists taking holiday orders by phone and online in a quiet upstairs office.

Jaimee and Doug began expansions that now include seven satellite sales shops in western Colorado and Denver. They also continued Chet’s tradition of regularly donating toffee to military members overseas and, closer to home, to service organizations and schools.

The Enstroms have never tweaked Chet’s original toffee recipe except to expand the ingredient quantities to mounds of butter, sacks of sugar, crates of almonds and slabs of chocolate.

Those quantities keep growing as Enstrom’s wholesale toffee sales have doubled in recent years. Direct-to-consumer sales have roller-coastered with around 3% to 5% annual increases.

Jim said the holidays always bring a big boost in sales because family spats and business blowbacks might occur if Enstrom toffee isn’t proffered as a Christmas gift. Handing out boxes of toffee is a tradition that goes back decades for many Enstrom customers.

“We are the gift people have come to expect,” he said. “If you don’t give Enstrom toffee, people are asking, ‘do you not like me anymore?’”

Amy Genrich agrees with that.

“The people I give it to — they have to have it,” she said. “It would be hard to try to give something else.”