Our Candy Comes from Mexico
These days, the odds are good that the candy we buy comes from Mexico.
From jellied hearts to chocolates, Mexico’s candy exports to the United States have more than doubled since 2002 as cheaper labor and sugar draw U.S. candy-makers south of the border.
The latest candy company, Hershey’s.
Why is that?
Many of them cited high U.S. sugar prices, which have been propped up for decades by government subsidies. Oh, government!
Companies with new Mexican operations include:
•Brach’s Confections, which closed its Chicago factory in 2003 and moved to a new factory in Linares, Mexico.
•Bobs Candies of Albany, Ga., a leader in the candy cane business, which moved the last of its production to Reynosa in 2005.
•Sunrise Confections, which opened a plant in Ciudad Jurez in 2001 to make candies for U.S. grocery store brands. For Valentine’s Day, it churns out jellied hearts, cinnamon hearts and pink-and-red jelly beans. It has 1,000 Mexican employees and is one of the biggest candymakers on the continent, said Beth Podol, the company’s marketing manager.
And now, Hershey, which once marketed itself as “The Great American Chocolate Bar,” has made the new plant in Monterrey the centerpiece of a $575 million cost-cutting plan.
Even though the companies said that the lower wages in Mexico wasn’t a draw, the fact is workers in Mexico’s processed food industry earn an average of $2.70 an hour, according to the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Data Processing. At Nestle’s factory in Toluca, a skilled machinery operator earns 220 pesos a day, about $15.70, said Maria Luis Ochoa, secretary of the local Chocolate Workers Union. The same worker in Hershey, Pa., earns $19 to $25 an hour, Bomberger said. Now they earn nothing, at least in making chocolate.
