North Chicago will be less sweet come October when the Jelly Belly Candy Co. pulls out of the city and closes the 101-year-old former Goelitz Confectionary plant. Shuttering the factory can’t be blamed on city officials.
It’s just business, according to Chicago-based Ferrara Candy Co., the company that owns the Jelly Belly Candy Co. “After careful review of the current volumes produced here, we are moving our manufacturing into another facility,” Ferrara officials said in a statement last week, adding it was a “difficult decision.”
The announcement comes just a few months after a study named North Chicago one of the top small U.S. cities for entrepreneurship. It was the second time in a decade the city was cited in that category by online personal finance company WalletHub.
The study released in April used three key dimensions: Business environment, access to resources and business costs, in ranking the best and worst small cities — 25,000 to 100,000 population — to start a business. It was one of two Illinois cities highlighted, the other being northwest-suburban Hanover Park, by WalletHub.
Apparently, that information wasn’t juice enough for Ferrara, which acquired the Jelly Belly jelly bean franchise in October from Goelitz family members, to keep the plant running. It will close on Oct. 11, nearly a year after Ferrara bought the company.
Fortunately for the 66 workers at the factory, they will be offered transfers to jobs at Ferrera’s five other manufacturing facilities in the Chicago area, the company says. Most drivers of the Tri-State Tollway are familiar with one of them: The former Curtiss Candy Co. plant in Franklin Park, south of the Bensenville Bridge, where chocolate smells waft in the breeze most days when Butterfingers and Baby Ruths, among other candy treats, are being made.
Guess we should have seen that closure coming after Jelly Belly, a fixture in North Chicago since 1913, was sold to Ferrara on Oct. 18, 2023. Ferrara, founded in Chicago’s Little Italy in 1908, itself was acquired in 2017 by Italian conglomerate Ferrero, the maker of the gold-foil-covered Ferrero Rocher candies popular at Christmastime, and the hazelnut-chocolate spread Nutella.
With five manufacturing facilities in the region, one of them had to close and the North Chicago plant, one of the oldest, was the site of choice. All Jelly Belly production was moved from North Chicago to California in 2014.
“We anticipate no impact to the Jelly Belly brand, our products or service to our customers,” Ferrara said in a statement. “Jelly Belly remains a critical component of our growth trajectory.”
Jelly Belly jelly beans, a favorite of former President Ronald Reagan who helped boost the brand after he took office in 1981, come in more than 100 flavors and are some of the best-known global candy brands. Jelly Belly sells the beans, which can be mixed and matched to create various flavors, in some 60 nations on five continents. Some of the beans even flew into space during a Space Shuttle mission in the 1980s.
Along with its North Chicago plant close to Naval Station Great Lakes on Morrow Avenue, which produced the iconic Halloween sweet treat, candy corn, white-centered “bulls-eye” caramels and various other sugary products, including gourmet chocolates, the company had a footprint in Waukegan. It had a distribution warehouse at 2383 N. Delany Road, north of Sunset Avenue, which later moved to Green Bay Road in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, where a factory outlet store was opened. That, too, was closed in 2020.
Jelly Belly was founded in downstate Belleville in 1869 by Gustav Goelitz, a German immigrant who learned the art of candy making, later moving to North Chicago. The company moved its headquarters to Fairfield, California, in the San Francisco North Bay area and changed its name from Goelitz Confectionary Co., to Jelly Belly Candy Co., in 2001.
For North Chicago economic development officials, there is another shell of Lake County’s manufacturing past being left empty come this fall. While WalletHub may consider the city prime for entrepreneurs, property on Sheridan Road, across from the Navy base, long-planned for development has remained vacant for years. Now, there will be another vacancy in the city’s once-vibrant manufacturing sector.
What will become of the Jelly Belly plant only Ferrara planners know for sure, but the loss of a major company is another sour blow to Lake County’s industrial future.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
Twitter: @sellenews