ANNOUNCER: Major funding for “Made in Maryland” is provided by... Offering big-bank capabilities and boutique-bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries, including manufacturing, across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank.

Your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente, which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality health care for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers Insurance.

Proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... NARRATOR: From boardwalk favorites, to handcrafted confections, Maryland has a knack for making life a little sweeter.

Three local makers, Dolly's Candyland, Jinji Chocolate, and Wockenfuss Candies, are keeping Maryland's most indulgent traditions alive.

For generations, Marylanders have flocked to Ocean City in search of sun, surf... and saltwater taffy.

For more than a century the Dolle family and their sweet treats have been synonymous with summer vacations, Eastern Shore traditions, and pride.

ANNA DOLLE BUSHNELL: Dolle's Candyland was founded by my grandfather and great-grandfather, manufacturing every day but Sunday here on Wicomico Street and the boardwalk, just like we have since 1910.

And we make all the things that people really relate to the beach: saltwater taffy, chocolates, caramels, caramel popcorn.

My grandfather and great-grandfather arrived here in Ocean City on invitation of the Trimper family, and it actually wasn't for candy.

It was for a carousel company.

Our family carved and operated carousels all over the country, and they had one in Baltimore, and so did the Trimpers, and that's how they got connected.

And in 1906, they came to Ocean City to scout out the area.

They bought this piece of property here on Wicomico Street, and at the same time, there was a man that was making saltwater taffy, and my great grandfather, bought him out.

They operated the carousel and the candy company starting in 1910, calling it Dolle's after our last name.

There's no saltwater in saltwater taffy.

Saltwater taffy ingredients include sugar, corn syrup, and flavors.

ANDREW DOLLE: This is our Hansella 111A vacuum cooker.

It is run by our steam boiler upstairs.

The exterior of this can get to be around 450 degrees or so.

And in the top, this is where we put our dry ingredients and our corn syrup, and it is mixed until it's cooked to the appropriate temperature.

We are gonna turn the vacuum on here shortly, and we're gonna bring all this candy from the top right down into the bottom, and we're gonna put this under atmospheric pressures, and that's going to pull off the remaining moisture that's on that batch.

The first time I ever made a batch of taffy, I was probably about 15 or 16.

When I first learned how to do taffy, we were making 133- pound batch, open kettle, and it was a little bit heavier and a little bit harder than it is today.

Over the 20 years of me being in the business, I've tried to scale things, do a little bit bigger, and a little less work.

Now, that candy is being pulled directly into the bottom vessel now.

So, from the top, it's getting sucked down, right?

And you're gonna hear the suction very shortly.

(suction engages) Okay.

Now we're gonna leave it in this vessel under pressure for two and a half minutes.

I'm gonna turn the water off, and I gotta turn the vacuum off.

So right now, each one of these pans is about 33, 34 pounds.

And the candy that comes out of here is probably close to about 200 degrees.

And what we're looking for in a perfectly cooked batch of candy like this is the way that that's folding as it comes out, and it has the plasticine look.

Right now, what we've got is the finished product.

What David here is going to do is just putting it in the ovens, and we're gonna let this proof overnight.

Michael here is gonna set them on the table here to cool off.

All of this job is done by touch.

He's looking for the appropriate feel of the candy.

Not too hard, not too soft, not too hot, not too cold.

How much time you think we got?

MICHAEL: About a minute.

ANDREW: Fuss it.

Fuss it.

Flip it over.

There you go.

I think we're ready.

So now he's got his candy mass here on the table, and we're going to be making strawberry saltwater taffy.

So, he's gonna add the flavor to this.

We're gonna go ahead and put the color into it next.

He's gonna pull this door down, and he's gonna start the aeration process.

This is adding air throughout it, so it gives it that stretchy chew-ability.

You can see the color of the candy has changed to a beautiful pink, and the candy has become more matte.

There's no more shininess to the candy.

And from here, we're going to let this cool down on the tables till it achieves the right consistency for wrapping.

Okay, so now he's got all of his taffy pulled, and what he's going to do is he's gonna be bringing that and putting it onto our batch former right here.

The batch former will take unruly candy, so to speak and it's going to elongate it and put it into a nice long cylinder.

From there, he's gonna go ahead and run it into the rope sizer, and that's going to change the diameter of the candy.

And from the rope sizer, he'll be running it into the wrapping machine, and that's going to cut it and wrap it into wax paper.

After all the candy is wrapped, we go ahead and put it here on the metal detector because we're using lots of metal.

And then after it goes through the metal detector, we palletize it, and then we take it upstairs for our packing.

ANNA: One of the things that I do is I always put a little piece of our past into our packaging today.

So, if people look at our saltwater taffy boxes, it shows the original candy box that the graphics came from.

I try to use our diamond design all the time in our popcorn because my grandfather started that.

It is very rooted in, in family, not only blood related, a lot of the staff that we have are related.

Amanda, who is my right-hand woman in the office, she started working here when she was 14.

Her sister works here as well and started when she was 14.

The boys that are downstairs are Amanda's sons.

Her cousin is in chocolates.

We treat each other like family.

We've known them, like Sean, since he was 14, almost like a little brother to me.

SEAN BLANCHARD: I'm originally from Montgomery County.

My grandparents were here in the early '90s, and they met Andrew and Anna's parents at 94th Street Mall, and that's where I met Andrew and Anna and their father.

I've been down at the beach since 2003 full time, working here at Dolle's Candyland and making my life at the beach.

Manufacturing is a great experience.

I love operating machinery.

It's been great working for this family.

It's hard to come by 25 years.

ANNA: The business was another member of the family.

My brother and I were always involved.

When I was about 11, I started working on the floor serving sodas.

My mom taught me how to write the schedule.

My dad taught me how to handle all the financial end of the business.

Andrew and I, we are yin and yang.

We see eye to eye on most things, so it's, it's nice.

In 2000, I graduated from college and my brother graduated from high school, and at that point we were like, "All right, it's, it's time to take this over."

We actually are building a new manufacturing facility off the boardwalk.

We'll always be here as a retail location.

We'll still make all the caramel popcorn, all the caramel apples from scratch on site.

But things like the saltwater taffy and the chocolate is gonna be brought over daily.

It's definitely a blessing to be able to continue the tradition of Dolle's Candyland.

Being a part of such a tradition for so many people and for the town, I think is very humbling.

Dolle's Candyland, passed down through the family for four generations now, hopefully onto the fifth.

In the wings, we have my daughter, she's 18.

She's going to school for business, which I'm very happy and proud of.

My brother Andrew has a son who's 17, and both have expressed interest in the business.

And I always want to nod to my grandfather.

He passed away 10 years before I was born.

But my dad often says, "Your grandfather wouldn't even believe it."

But I would hope that they would be proud that we have continued it on and take a lot of pride in that.

NARRATOR: Dolle's Candyland tastes like fond memories of warm Maryland summers carried straight off the boardwalk.

In Baltimore's historic Waverly neighborhood, Jinji Chocolate honors the people who cultivate cacao by working directly with small, independent growers.

The result is a chocolate true to its origins yet distinctly Maryland.

JINJI FRASER: Chocolate can be simple.

It's all just very small micro batch.

Many of the things that we do have two ingredients, three ingredients in them.

Jinji Chocolate was started in 2012.

It began as something that helped bridge the gap between refined foods and holistic ones.

There's a certain kind of grit and acceptance here, and I love, love, love that we get to share this with the neighborhood, with Baltimore community as a whole.

It's not the chocolate itself, it's the connection.

It's meeting us.

It's hearing our story.

It's seeing how our story is similar to your own story.

Cacao grows globally about 20 degrees up north and south of the equator.

It takes seven years to grow, and it's a very sensitive fruit.

So, all of the farms that are around the world, there are about 1% that are owned by women, whereas about 90% of the work is done by women.

It was a priority of ours to work with women-owned farms, family-owned farms.

We thought that what little impact we can make, we wanted to make on that level.

We can work together as partners in moving forward and bringing their fruit to chocolate.

Our signature drink, it's made from the paste of the cacao.

It's made from chocolate itself as well.

And what I hope it will eventually reflect in the chocolate industry is this idea of taking it back to that rustic root, and I think that that gives a voice to communities that really have been silenced and erased over the years.

We roast beans one pound at a time.

Alrighty, what do you have?

JONATHAN SETON: Okay, so time to sort.

So, I pick up a bean, and I'm actually pinching it.

A good bean is gonna be nice and firm.

Fermentation is the, the, the smell of the beans.

It is pungent.

JINJI: It's almost like a vinegar smell that you get right now.

So, what we wanna do as makers is to taste it to see if other fruit trees, other herbs that are growing there are coming through the bean itself.

It's not a culinary experience as much as it just is, like, a technical checkpoint.

JONATHAN: Then when you're getting into the chocolate making, roasting is the first opportunity as chocolate makers to influence the flavor of your bar or of your chocolate.

The next step will be roasting.

All right, y'all ready to roast?

We're at 116 right now, and I'm paying a lot of attention to how quickly the temperature is rising.

One of the notes that I get from these beans is a very strong smell of baking brownies.

Some grassy notes, more florals.

We are done with this roast.

Right now, we have our beans in this cooling rack.

It has air that's blowing up.

They're cool now.

JINJI: All right... JONATHAN: You ready?

JINJI: ...so now we're gonna put our cover over it like this.

JONATHAN: The beans have an outer shell, and within that are the cacao nibs.

Um, so we are just breaking that outer shell.

We do go in by hand just to kind of crack any that were missed.

We've been working together for so long.

I'm the historian of the relationship.

I am.

I have the better memory.

I do.

I do.

JINJI: It's true.

You do.

JONATHAN: It's true.

These are starting to look pretty good.

JINJI: All right, so I'm gonna put our freshly cracked beans in this bowl as we prepare to winnow.

Some fresh nibs without much of the hulls.

JINJI: My dad and I started the business 14 years ago.

He had just retired from the federal government, and I needed help.

My best friend, Jonathan, he makes all the chocolate, and then he manages a team- two to three part-time people.

JONATHAN: When I started here, I had no idea it would turn into a career, a craft that I have enjoyed mastering.

I had started here as just a part-time worker while I was in school studying psychology, and then I took on different aspects of the production.

Being able to take a raw material, these beans that have been grown at origin, traveled farther than I've probably been in my life, and transform those into a product that I'll get to enjoy, I love doing it.

I was born and raised here in Baltimore.

It's really an honor to be producing a craft chocolate in the city that I grew up in.

JINJI: So, I graduated from college in 2005, and I pretty much went right into corporate work as a nutrition counselor and then went right into doing this.

It was the first time that I'd owned a business, first time anyone in my family had owned a business.

This is not a solo journey.

I was lucky to have family support, friend support.

Not everybody will have that, but everybody will have something.

I love the responsibility of making good choices and making good decisions and being gentle on the world and gentle on the earth.

Motherhood has been a huge proving ground, and this business has been a huge proving ground for motherhood.

I had my son five years ago, and it's amazing just the devotion and the similarities, honestly, in growing the two of them.

But the future for Jinji Chocolate, first of all, is in Baltimore.

It's evolving in every way that we can.

I hope the future for the cacao industry includes more opportunity to understand lineage and understand generational influence on chocolate, and my hope is that we can educate people on the mystery of chocolate.

NARRATOR: Northeast of Jinji's in the Woodring neighborhood, three sisters continue a four-generation candy legacy, mixing hard work, creativity, and family tradition into every batch.

It's a simple reminder that some of the sweetest successes are shared and passed on.

JENNIFER WATERS: We love what we do.

Wockenfuss Candies manufactures over 100 items on average, a mix of milk and dark chocolate creams, nuts, chewies, chocolate-covered pretzels, barks.

JANICE WOCKENFUSS-MOTTER: We have three enrobers, so when all three are running, our max is about 600 pounds.

The fourth generation of Wockenfuss consists of our sister Chris, who resides in Ocean City, Maryland, and runs our businesses there, and Janice and myself.

While we have different personalities, it benefits us at work that each person has strengths in their own role.

JENNIFER: Our great-grandfather started the business in 1915 after coming to America from Prussia, Germany.

JANICE: Originally sold in all the city markets, I think as many as 20, including Northeast Market and Lexington Market.

JENNIFER: His son, Herman Lee, took over the business with his wife, Marian, in the '40s after they were married, and then our father, Paul, took over the business in the '70s.

JANICE: While my grandparents were running the business, my father worked alongside them for 20 or 30 years, and then when we came in, we worked with our father for another 20 years.

So, there's a generational overlap.

We all worked through our teenage years, but then our dad wanted us all to pursue our own dream.

He never wanted us to feel obligated to come work in the business, so all three of us went to college and did different things for a couple years out of college until we realized that we missed it.

But he wanted us to want the business and not feel like we had to run the business.

With some health changes that happened during COVID, our father and our uncle both retired sooner than expected, and both within a short amount of time of one another.

So, we took over.

I was put in more of a manufacturing position that I'd never had before, but the three of us really pitched in together and took over all aspects.

JENNIFER: I didn't step into the manufacturing like Janice did.

I had already been taking over my father's duties of buying, so I just took on more.

JANICE: And we are proud to be running the business today.

JANICE: We have three production lines.

We do a dark chocolate enrober, a milk chocolate enrober, and then tunnels specifically for our nonpareils.

JENNIFER: Vanilla buttercream was our original cream, and then we grew to make chocolate creams, raspberry, orange, coconut, hazelnut.

JANICE: We start every batch with a recipe.

We follow that recipe, but things can change.

Baltimore's summers are very humid, so we actually do tweak our recipes depending on the temperature.

So, there is an art to it.

Today, we're gonna see the manufacturing process for our dark chocolate vanilla buttercreams.

We start the buttercream in the kitchen.

We measure out all of our ingredients.

We start with sugar and corn syrup.

We cook it to a boil, cool it in the cream beater.

fluff it with some marshmallow, and then we'll take it out to the enrobing line.

This is the next stage in making our buttercream.

We've brought the cream out from the kitchen, and we've brought it out to our enrobing line.

We're gonna start at this machine, which is our extruder, and it takes the cream and shapes it into the perfect size piece to run down the line before we coat it in chocolate.

The cream comes out of the extruder, goes onto the first belt, and now we're putting a bottom coat of chocolate onto it.

The bottom coat will allow the chocolate to keep from sticking to the belt, so it'll get a first coat of chocolate and go onto a cold plate, and this helps the chocolate harden.

From the cold plate, the creams will go into the enrober, and from there they'll get a coat of chocolate all over the piece of candy.

At this point, the creams have a coating of rich dark chocolate on top of them.

We just need them to go into a cooling tunnel so the chocolate can harden before we package it.

Here the finished product comes out of the cooling tunnel.

The chocolate is set and ready to be packaged.

Daisy is boxing them now in stock boxes to go to our retail stores.

We have about 120 employees.

A large majority work here on the manufacturing side.

Ben started with us two years ago.

And Ben is in charge of everything except for the actual production of the candies.

BEN HAUSER: I'm a second-generation chocolatier.

My father's born, raised, and trained in Switzerland, and he eventually started a chocolate company with my mother, and so I grew up around the chocolate business.

My biggest responsibility is help make everything run smoothly here, whether that's with people or machinery.

I am in the kitchen a lot as well.

Shir is our main kitchen guy, but I can cook all the recipes if I need to.

Originally I wasn't actually looking for a job specifically with Wockenfuss.

My wife and I had our own candy company, and we decided to close up shop.

I was liquidating some of our equipment.

I called the Wockenfusses, and as a friendly competitor over the years, they weren't really looking for any equipment at the time, but they asked me to come in and talk to them.

So, I did that and pretty much walked out there, uh, that day with a job.

JENNIFER: I remember hanging up and calling Janice, and I was like, "We have to have him in and meet with him.

He's gonna be the answer to our prayers."

I love hearing the customers, being with the customers, helping them shop for their gifts.

That's the key to our business.

It is a huge blessing that we're here today carrying on the name.

My grandmother was an extremely, extremely hard worker and very proud of her business and her company and every detail that she put into it, and that passed on to our father and has passed on to us, and it affects us every day.

JANICE: Some would say she ran a lot of the business, if not all of it, alongside my grandfather.

But the accounts weren't in her name.

At that time, you know, it was my grandfather's business, so I don't think she got the credit, and I think we're fortunate to be able to put our name on it.

There's something about this that just kind of tugs at your heart, and we each have a daughter.

It's very empowering to be a woman owned business.

Baltimore has several candy family businesses, and we're all friends.

There's an organization that we all belong to, and we help each other out if somebody needs a product or raw material.

I guess we're competitors, but we're not direct competitors.

Everybody has maybe their own side of town.

We respect each other's business, and I would say it's very amicable.

JENNIFER: We have been very blessed to have a successful business here, and we can't wait to see what the future holds.

NARRATOR: Family run, women owned businesses across Maryland grow out of years of steady resilience and care passed down through generations.

Their stories show how building something with family and friends becomes a way of carrying Maryland's traditions forward.

One cacao bean at a time.

DWIGHT CAMPBELL: This is ice cream reinvented and reimagined how ice cream should be.

My name is Dwight Campbell and the co-founder and executive chef of Cajou Creamery.

We do a premium cashew milk ice cream.

Most of our customers, 90% of our customers, can't even tell that it's a non-dairy ice cream.

I know as a chef that we are the ones that are most underrepresented on the ice cream shelves.

We're the highest rate in heart disease and chronic, chronic illnesses is people of color.

So, if we're going to do something, let's do it so that we can benefit.

This is the way that we can give to our community by creating flavors like baklava and horchata and Mexican cocoa, because we use the cleanest ingredients that those communities can remember their home, remember their families.

They can see themselves in these flavors.

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for "Made in Maryland" is provided by... Offering big-bank capabilities and boutique-bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries, including manufacturing, across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank.

Your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente, which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality health care for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers Insurance.

Proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪