‘It’s more than just chocolate. It’s Tacoma.’ Candymaker celebrates 100 years

“My grandfather used to say: ‘Even in the bad times, people buy chocolate.”

Let’s hope Bill Johnson’s grandfather is still right.

Johnson Candy Co. celebrates a momentous occasion in 2025 — 100 years in Tacoma, all of it in the Hilltop neighborhood. The family’s sweet history dates back even further, though, likely to the mid-1910s, when Louis Johnson helmed Olympic Dairy on South K Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. His son and daughter-in-law, Russell and Irene Johnson, took charge around 1925, adding a lunch counter that also sold outsourced candies.

As Bill tells it, Russell figured he could make them just as well. So he trained with a candymaker named Senator Finley, eventually buying his recipes. After Russell’s death in 1997 at age 96, Bill’s dad Ron remembered the reasoning from more of a financial perspective in a story in The News Tribune: “When customers paid their bills, they bought candy on the way out. The candy bill got larger and larger over time, so dad decided to expand and just have a candy store.”

At one point, according to Bill via his father, fellow Tacoma candymaker Frank C. Mars — later, of course, of M&M fame — asked Russell if he wanted to team up. Johnson didn’t have the money, said Bill: “I probably wouldn’t be here if he had!”

Either way, truth holds that in 1949, Russell and Irene scrapped the lunch counter concept and shuffled down the street to a new, concrete and Roman-brick, art-deco building designed by architect Silas E. Nelsen. Johnson Candy Co. has anchored this corner at 924 Martin Luther King Jr. Way ever since.

TACOMA CANDY TRADITION

On a Tuesday morning in April, less than two weeks before Easter, a few employees cheerfully assisted customers in selecting candies for a basket or just satisfying today’s sweet tooth. “Would you like a sample?” is baked into their hellos.

The doorbell jingled as Noni Haight walked in with her 2-year-old daughter, who had an appointment nearby. They live in Parkland now, but Haight was raised in Hilltop, and a Johnson Candy visit was their tradition after a doctor’s visit.

“I got to choose a candy,” she recalled, “but they always give samples. This place has been a part of home. It’s more than just chocolate. It’s Tacoma.”

Ron inherited the business in the early 1960s, maintaining the same from-scratch recipes for chocolate truffles, creams, nougat-filled rounds, nut clusters and caramels. At that time, they sold candy throughout the Pacific Northwest, including to many taverns that offered them as a prize to a pull-tab-type gamble, “which is crazy to me,” said Bill this April, “that people who hung out at bars would get excited about a piece of chocolate!”

There was no guarantee that Johnson Candy would have outlived Irene, now in her 80s, and Ron, who at 92 still plays a vital role in the business today. He was still in the shop daily until Bill insisted he cool it during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I sent him home and said, ‘You can’t come in anymore!’”

Bill calls him every morning, and his dad places orders for ingredients, including some that are getting harder and harder to find — like coarse confectioners sugar — and others that require increasingly large minimums that challenge the family’s ability to continue offering their old-fashioned treats at a reasonable price.

“When I left for college, I thought I’d mopped my last floor here for sure,” said Bill in an interview. He had spent most of the 1990s working in Seattle restaurants. In 2002, he estimated, he got a call from his mother, essentially saying, “Dad’s getting old.”

Did he feel an obligation to continue the legacy?

“No, not at all,” he replied without skipping a beat. “I don’t know what else I’d do.”

100 YEARS OF CHOCOLATE

He learned the tricks of the trade, which, at Johnson Candy are rooted in feeling. To make the caramel, Bill explained, “You just put your hand over it. When the sugar hardens a bit, that’s when you take it off.”

The maple floors of the second floor candy room are not littered with thermometers or fancy gadgets. It’s more like a living museum, with long, custom-made, marble-slab tables to hold the rows and rows of chocolates and caramel and eggs, one-of-a-kind treats as each and every one is formed by hand. The iron stand of the copper kettle, as big as a boat anchor, is basically caramelized to the floor after decades of up to 900-degree, gas-powered heat. It also has an electric motor, a mesmerizing detail considering the date welded onto the arm that holds the spinning metal paddle: July 28, 1914.

Russell would have purchased this machine used, said Bill, as with most things in the shop. “1958” has been written in permanent marker on the side of an enrober from W.C. Smith and Sons, a confectionery machine company in Philadelphia. Bill said his dad had kept the paperwork for the latter secondhand scoop: $850 in 1980.

“These things run like a tank; they never break,” said Bill. To replace any of this equipment today would cost three figures, minimum, and likely several.

As his own children in their early teens grow, he wants them to go through school and find a career they love.

“Sometimes I love it, sometimes it’s really hard,” said Bill of keeping the old-fashioned candy tradition alive in a world freshly obsessed with seemingly any new food fad. “I don’t know if small businesses like this are gonna remain viable.”

As costs have risen, Johnson Candy has hesitated to raise their prices too quickly or too drastically.

“I don’t want it to be a luxury that regular Tacomans can’t afford,” said Bill. “Small businesses are really what make a community unique. Our customers are great. I feel forever indebted to them, and that’s why you do it.”

In honor of the 100th anniversary and Easter holiday, the shop is again offering its “Golden Egg” contest, in which select eggs (including Bill’s favorite peanut butter and the popular Divinity, filled with a homemade marshmallow fluff) are randomly wrapped with a hidden gold foil. Prizes include tote bags, T-shirts and limited-edition glass eggs from Hilltop Artists.

JOHNSON CANDY CO.

▪ 924 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma, 253-272-8504, johnsoncandyco.com

▪ Monday-Friday 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

▪ Easter specials: edible chocolate baskets filled with candies as well as regular baskets, eggs in various flavors and fillings, molded bunnies and more, plus the multitude of chocolates available daily

This story was originally published April 13, 2025 at 6:00 AM.