Handmade treats are labor of love

The company helped create a Valentine's Day tradition.
TYRONE, Pa. (AP) -- Around Valentine's Day, you can find Jane Brown at Gardner's Candies, buying peanut butter meltaways for her husband. Jack Chernega buys assorted nuts, covered in dark chocolate for his wife, milk chocolate for himself and peanut butter meltaways for the kids.
Both praise Gardner's for its smooth consistency and unique flavor. But when they give that candy to their respective sweeties, they're giving more than just a box of chocolate -- they're giving a taste of history.
Tucked into the mountains of central Pennsylvania, this small-town chocolatier, where most of the candies are still made by hand, is thought to be the first U.S. chocolate maker to sell its products in valentine-decorated boxes.
"It is believed that Gardner's was one of the first, if not the first, to use a heart-shaped box for Valentine's Day," Gardner's president Sam Phillips said, saying that founder James "Pike" Gardner first sold Valentine's chocolates in the early 1900s. "I can't prove it, but it's one of those handed-down stories."
It wasn't really a heart-shaped box, at least according to the museum display in the back of the Gardner's Candies store in downtown Tyrone. Rather, it was a standard, rectangular box with a decorative paper cutout and a heart-shaped doily.
And it wasn't the first heart-shaped box of Valentine's chocolate. That record goes to British chocolatier Richard Cadbury, who introduced a heart-shaped box in 1868, according to Susan Fussell, spokeswoman for the Virginia-based Chocolate Manufacturers Association.
A big event
But Fussell and Phillips agree that no matter how the tradition started, Valentine's Day has grown into one of the biggest events of the year for the candy industry. Members of the Chocolate Manufacturers Association and National Confectioners Association say chocolate will make up three-quarters of the expected $1.05 billion in candy sales for Valentine's Day this year, including some 36 million heart-shaped boxes of candy.
Brown and Chernega are among the reasons why. Both have made a habit of visiting Gardner's before Valentine's Day.
"It's just good chocolate," Chernega said. "It's very creamy, milky -- just unusually good."
"I don't know the process," Brown said, "but they must be doing something. The peanut butter meltaways are so much better than Hershey's. They do just what they say. They really do melt away in your mouth."
Phillips said the process -- or, more accurately, the lack of processing -- is important.
The scene
Gardner's employees decorate and pack their products on the assembly line in a scene seemingly straight out of "I Love Lucy" -- a scene that customers can see for themselves on guided tours through the kitchen and production lines. Red-clad ladies still roll peanuts by hand in melted chocolate to make every peanut cluster. Cremes and caramels are mixed by hand in the kitchen and cooled on giant stone tables.
But Phillips said it's the ingredients that set Gardner's chocolates apart. Caramels are made with heavy cream instead of milk. Fruit cremes are made with pureed fruit instead of artificial flavoring. And the chocolate that coats everything from peanut butter to popcorn is made from the highest-quality beans.
"It's just like there's good coffee and bad coffee, good coffee beans and bad coffee beans, there's good cocoa beans and bad cocoa beans," Phillips said. "We get a special blend of cocoa beans, the chocolate's a high cocoa-butter content, and that's what gives it its unique flavor. Our chocolate's a little lighter in color than most chocolate, and that's part of the bean. And the flavor is unique and hard to match."