Candy Is Dandy

With its soda-pop and jellybean atmosphere, San Francisco's Blum's (rhymes with Tums) looks like any old-fashioned corner candy store. Blum's hustling, bustling proprietor, Fred Levy, 37, wants his customers to think that's just what it is. But the atmosphere is deceiving. Blum's sells more candy (780,000 lbs. last year in its San Francisco store alone) than any other retail store in the world, and has a list of mail-order customers that reads like Who's Who (among them: Eisenhower, Noel Coward, Jim Farley, Lauren Bacall).

Blum's candy had been always handmade. As a result, such stores as Dallas' Neiman-Marcus and Manhattan's Lord & Taylor never had enough to satisfy the customers. Says Fred Levy: "We planned it that way. We make everybody want it, then make it hard to get."

Last week Fred Levy changed tactics. He would make his wares plentiful and cheap. He switched over to machine production, to step up output. Then he made a deal with Rexall Drug Inc. and 500 other stores, to sell 2,000,000 one-pound boxes at $1 a box this year, and with ABC Vending Corp., world's largest vendors of candy, to sell a 10-c- candy bar (Blum's first bar) in its slot machines.

High Hat. When Fred Levy, a brash young securities salesman, took over Blum's in 1934 (he had married a granddaughter of the late Simon Blum, the founder), the company was $26,000 in debt, and facing bankruptcy. The first thing Levy did was phone his customers and ask: "What's wrong with Blum's?" They told him Blum's had been turning out the same old candy since Simon Blum set up shop in 1892, and they were tired of it.

Levy told his candymakers to experiment, soon had them producing a new-type candy every day. Blum's now makes 1,308 different varieties of candy, ice cream and cakes (his St. Patrick's Day ice cream is labeled "Erin Ga Blum"). Levy also prodded sales with some merchandising razzle-dazzle, put candy in everything from French porcelain dishes and satin hats to great, flat, silver-wrapped boxes the size of dinner trays. He plugged snob appeal and "personalized" packages. (Singer Hildegarde's is shaped like a grand piano.)

Black Ink. Last year Blum's grossed some $3,500,000, and made an estimated net profit of $164,000. Most of it went to Levy, who controls three-fourths of the closely held stock. This year Levy expects to boost Blum's gross to $5,000,000. Next year Blum's will move into a new, block-long, $1,360,000 store and factory cut up into small, friendly little salesrooms. Levy doesn't want to lose that corner-store atmosphere. "We want to keep it the kind of place," he says, "where nobody will be afraid to ask for jellybeans."

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