It's not yet Valentine's Day, and Lucille's chocolatier is working on Easter

Janice Eisman, a third-generation owner and chocolatier of Lucille’s Candies, finishes wrapping up three 20-pound chocolate rabbits before moving on to the next order of 12 three-pound dark chocolate bunnies. Although it’s only February, the Valentine’s Day candy making is complete, with chocolate hearts and flowers already packaged and sold in the main store in Manahawkin.

“It’s the old trick,” said Eisman. “You show the next holiday before the holiday people are shopping for. You plant the seed so they know what they want to buy.”

Photo by Ryan Morrill
Janice Eisman fills Easter egg molds with
dark chocolate, using a manual pump.

Always one step ahead, the candy maker zips around the company’s second shop in Brant Beach, pouring melted chocolate into old, German-style Easter egg molds and transferring them to the magnetic rotational filler, what she calls the “spinner.” It is kept in a small refrigeration unit, which is set at a balmy 42 degrees. The spinner helps set the molds and fill in the air bubbles by rotating them 160 degrees in both directions.

It’s a monotonous job, Eisman admits.

“Each mold in this building is a different product,” she said. “I just fill these molds all day long, over and over and over and over again.”

Eisman makes 148 different items for Easter, including rabbits, chicks, cows, dogs, frogs and cats. Every Easter season, the store averages around 12,000 pounds of chocolate, which is about 35,000 individual pieces.

“We’re going through 3,000 pounds of dark (chocolate), and I just had a pallet of 2,500 pounds of milk chocolate come in,” she said.

As a chocolatier making confectionary from chocolate, which is different than a chocolate maker who creates chocolate from cacao beans, Eisman comes into the shop six days a week to flip on the equipment and check on the chocolate, which is kept liquid overnight. When the chocolate is cooked, it must have a nice, shiny look and a clean snap, she explained.

To check the temperature of the chocolate, she dips her finger into the melting tank and presses it to her upper lip, “where your mustache grows.” Chocolate should be heated to 91 degrees. If it is too hot, the molds will dry with gray or white streaks, she explained.

Although Eisman originally attended college to pursue a career in accounting, she said she is glad she decided to work in the family business. The job suits her hyperactive nature, she said, and she has a lifetime of experience working in the shop.

Photo by Ryan Morrill
The 20- and three-pound chocolate bunnies
are already packaged and ready to be sold.

Candy makers were originally called confectioners, said Eisman, but the process and the name changed to “chocolatier” around the 1960s and ’70s. She grew up working in the industry alongside her parents, Ginger and Larry, and her brothers, Karl and Nathaniel, pulling icing decorations off of wax paper and placing them on cream eggs traveling down the conveyor belt.

“In grade school you have little fingers, so I could peel them without breaking them,” Eisman remembered. “Now my hands are bigger, and they’re kind of clumsy. They don’t cooperate with me some days.”

The 48-year-old’s professional confectionary skills date back to her grandparents, Lucille and Larry, who originally opened the business in 1927 in Philadelphia, before they relocated it 20 years later to East Bay Avenue, which was the main road to Long Beach Island at the time.

“This was my grandfather’s fishing spot,” said Eisman. “I realized that this was really a happier place to be. My family was here. Even though sometimes working with your family can be tricky, for the most part we were all pretty happy, and we liked what we did.

Photo by Ryan Morrill
Chocolate hearts are the last of the
Valentine's Day inventory.

“It’s a nice environment, let’s be honest. It smells good, and most of the time people are happy here,” she added. “In hindsight, I think I would have been miserable in accounting, sitting at a desk all day and telling people things they don’t want to hear, or have to change. No thanks; I’d rather create a product.”

After much success, the family opened a second shop on the oceanside of Long Beach Island. The shop, known for its gigantic “Oh Fudge” sign, is the chocolatier’s main headquarters.

“Depending on what we’re making, I can pour a rabbit, have it dried and ready to come out of the mold within a half an hour,” Eisman claimed. “If it’s a seven-pound rabbit, I can have it done in an hour. If it’s a 20-pound rabbit, it takes me 2½ hours. The more chocolate, the more drying time.”

The Brant Beach store is only open as a retail shop during the summer months. In the off-season, the shop is converted into a chocolate factory, used solely for cooking and packaging chocolate. Eisman creates orders for about 30 other stores and 10 fundraisers for different schools. Although she helps decorate the products, she said she prefers to do the cooking. She uses the same recipe and Wilbur chocolate her grandparents started with.

Although the process is mostly the same, the prices have, of course, increased. As a kid, Eisman said the cost for a pound of chocolate retailed around $10. A pound of chocolate now retails around $18.50.

“Chocolate is a commodity just like sugar, corn, gold, or silver, because it’s grown,” Eisman explained. “It’s supply and demand. It varies all the time. In my lifetime the cost has doubled.”

But the high price is nothing compared to the strain of the manual labor required of a chocolatier, Eisman said. She receives the chocolate in 50-pound cases. Sugar is delivered in 50-pound bags, and corn syrup comes in 260-pound barrels. A single batch of fudge requires a gallon of water, 12 pounds of corn syrup, three pounds of sugar, 12 quarts of light cream and three pounds of butter.

“You have to manually put that all in a giant copper pot, then put the pot on the stove and cook it,” she explained. “There’s not many of us left because nobody wants to do this kind of work, because it’s manual labor.

“I’m not saying a woman can’t do it. I’ve done it for 20 years, but it’s nice to have a guy to help you unload the chocolate, too,” she added. “It’s nice to have a guy to help the ladies because most of my employees are my age, and they get tired. But who’s to say? Look at me, I’m doing it, and I’m 48.”

Working as a chocolatier is also messy work. The sweet chocolate stains clothing, hands and floors. Eisman said she replaces the cardboard, used to keep the floor free of chocolate, every two weeks.

“Chocolate is a liquid. That’s why I’m so dirty,” she said.

But despite the messy work and even poor dental health from eating so much chocolate throughout the day, Eisman said she really does love her job.

“Being a chocolatier is fun, I have to say. Right now I’m making chocolate rabbits. When I’m done chocolate rabbits I will turn into a retail store, and I will be selling fudge and salt water taffy,” she said. “My brothers will be sending me taffies and chocolates and nonpareils, raisin clusters, coconut clusters – that product line. That’s what they create in their building. Then the fall rolls around, and I’m back to making hollow pumpkins, turkeys and Santas. And then, bam, you’re right back into Easter, making a different product.”

— Kelley Anne Essinger


This article was published in The SandPaper.