Colorful chocolates

PHOTOGRAPHER: Bruce Squiers

Mike Fitzgerald, owner of Saratoga Sweets candy store in Halfmoon, hovers over a basket of foil-wrapped miniature chocolate Easter eggs. His shop sells more than 500 pounds of the sweets every Easter.

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Spring colors for the garden are still a few weeks away.

There’s no need to wait for a pastel party; pinks, yellows, lavenders and baby blues are inside today. Easter has arrived, and so have small, foil-wrapped chocolate Easter eggs.

“They’re the foundation of any Easter basket,” said Joseph Suhrada, owner of Uncle Sam’s Homemade Chocolates in Schenectady. “I’ve never sold a basket without them. They have to be in the Easter basket.”

The football-shaped sweets are not the biggest stars in wicker. Chocolate rabbits in big ears and bow ties are still boss. Jelly beans are traditional runners-up, but eggs are aces for many brown candy aficionados.

Competing with rabbits

In the United States, they’ve been around since the mid-1950s. The eggs had been earlier hits in Europe.

“Eggs are a big part of the Easter holiday in Europe,” said Joan Sweeting, vice president of sales and marketing at Madelaine Chocolate Novelties in Rockaway Beach, Long Island. “I believe up until then, mostly rabbits were the big part of the American Easter holiday. These little foil-wrapped chocolate eggs were coming in from Europe and some of the local confectioners came to us and asked if we could make them here. I don’t know if we were the first ones in the U.S. to start making them, but I think we pretty close to it.”

Sweeting said the mini-chocolates were a perfect combination of existing Easter treats.

“Colored eggs are just part of the ritual of Easter — coloring eggs, the idea of spring,” she said.

Sweeting added that molding chocolate into the shape of an egg, and wrapping them in shiny, colored foil, equals an attractive and tasty product.

Mike Fitzgerald, owner of the Saratoga Sweets candy store in Halfmoon, sells between 500 and 800 pounds of miniature eggs every Easter season. Like other local shops, he buys his eggs from larger chocolate manufacturers that mass produce the foil treats. At Saratoga Sweets, an 8-ounce bag containing about 30 eggs costs $4.50.

“The foil candies, in the last eight to 10 years, have really come into their own,” Fitzgerald said.

Appearance counts

The big reason is color. The eggs are wrapped in both solid, swirl and floral print patterns.

“Ten years ago, they were all solids,” Fitzgerald said. “They switched to patterns, different colors. You’ll see the more traditional pastels for Easter, but now these colors — purples, silvers, deeper greens — have kind of taken over.”

Suhrada also knows the value of appearances.

“Color is important in my business,” he said. “It’s not just the taste, but it’s the look of the product.”

That’s why people buy bright red foil hearts around Valentine’s Day, red and green foil-wrapped balls at Christmas and white-wrapped “baseballs” (with seams) during the summer. As seasons change, so do color preferences. “You don’t see the magenta or the lavender in the Christmas mix,” Suhrada said.

The size matters, too.

“They’re bite-sized,” Suhrada said. “They’re not too much and they’re not too little.”

Fitzgerald says more options for March and April Easter baskets are on the way.

“The next color phase that you’re going to see is orange and teal,” he said. “The foil guys, they follow the basket guys, and the basket guys have found the more vibrant colors at Easter have really taken over. It used to be strictly pink, blue, yellow. Five years ago, I couldn’t sell an orange basket, couldn’t give away an orange basket.”

But today, Fitzgerald expects kids are finding many orange baskets hidden around their houses.

Trying to stand out

Chocolatiers aren’t the only ones selling spring-colored sweets. National brand candies also change hues at Easter. Miniature Hershey bars appear in pastel foils. The M&M’s branch of Mars Inc. dips peanuts and plains in vats of pink and light yellow.

“The M&M thing never really took off the way M&M had intended,” Fitzgerald said. “They were really mimicking the Jelly Belly [jelly bean] program with the colors, and they felt candy stores across the country would all be carrying these full-rack M&M displays with all different colors. And while it’s done pretty well in mall scenarios, most of the independent candy guys were not located in the mall. They found it didn’t do it for them.”

Foil hides a variety of chocolate.

“They originally were only milk chocolate,” said Bob Pikcilingis, owner of Candy Kraft in Guilderland. “As dark has become very popular now, they do them in dark chocolate, they do them in the white chocolate, they’ve added crispy rice to them to make a crispy one, and now they’re starting to put fillings in them. So there’s a milk with a peanut butter filling, a truffle filling, coconut filling and caramel.”

The foil footballs just aren’t for kids, either.

“I have it on very good authority,” Fitzgerald said, “that a lot of times when the Easter Bunny is preparing baskets for the kids . . . I think the Easter Bunny eats some of those eggs.”