(upbeat music) - [Geoffrey] Chicago was once America's undisputed candy capital.

Snickers, Butterfingers, and Lemonheads, Pixies and Milk Duds, Juicy Fruits, Frango Mints, Tootsie Rolls, Brach's Peppermints, and so many others, all came from Chicago.

- Oh yeah, back in the early '60s, late '50s, almost every other block had some type of candy store, even the mom and pop type.

- [Geoffrey] Jerry Meyers has worked in Chicago's candy industry for 40 years.

One of his biggest claims to fame, Jerry invented Fannie May's famous eggnog cream candy.

- I actually went out, and I bought about five quarts of different brands of eggnog, tasted 'em, and tasted 'em, and tasted 'em until I can match what I thought would be a good eggnog flavor.

- And then you went to your cardiologist after that.

(both laugh) Jerry has a chocoholic's dream job.

- What we're basically gonna do is taste this milk chocolate here.

- Okay.

- It involves tasting a lot of chocolate, and he's quite good at it.

Just the tip of the tongue?

- Just the tip of the tongue.

- Where I might taste the obvious, oh, it's chocolate, he tastes all kinds of flavors.

- Chocolate, sweet, dairy, and then bitter at the end.

- Now, are you like a dancer?

Is your tongue insured by the Lloyds of London or something?

- (laughs) No, it's not.

- [Geoffrey] Part of what made Chicago such a candy manufacturing hub was its sizable European immigrant population, who brought candy making skills over with them, and the Midwest had all the right ingredients too.

- We use a lot of corn syrup and sugar, and corn, as you know, is grown in this part of the country, and we use dairies from the Midwest.

- [Geoffrey] At the Tootsie Roll Factory on Chicago's southwest side, these Midwestern ingredients are cooked, mixed together, cooled, and formed into these gigantic Tootsie Rolls.

- And it's going through an extruder, so that it's in manageable sizes.

- [Geoffrey] So this is not gonna be one big Tootsie roll here?

- No, no, this piece of Tootsie Roll is going to be made into some hundreds of pieces of small Tootsie Rolls.

- Oh, okay.

The recipe for the Tootsie Roll was brought over from Austria by Leo Hirschfeld.

He named his candy after his daughter, whose nickname was Tootsie.

How many Tootsie Rolls do you crank outta here every day?

- Oh, we make about 66 million Tootsie Rolls every single day.

- A day?

- A day.

- They also make Tootsie Pops here and Dots, those gumdrops on steroids that you get at the movie theater.

After more than a century of being America's candy capital, in the last decade, many of Chicago's big candy companies have gone under or moved their manufacturing abroad.

Some say the future of Chicago's candy industry lies in so-called artisanal chocolate makers, like Chocolate Potpourri in Glenview.

These smaller companies add a personal touch to their candies.

These are not machines making the products here, right.

- Machines don't do this.

I think it's really the attention to the detail and the love that goes into making the product.

- [Geoffrey] Is this gonna make Chicago back into a candy capital again?

- [Richard] I hope it would.

It would be great for Chicago.