See's Candies

History

Charles Alexander See II was born in Gananoque, Ontario, Canada, and came to California in 1921 with his wife Florence MacLean Wilson See and his widowed mother Mary Wiseman See. Mary See had developed the candy recipes while helping run her husband's hotel on Tremont Island, one of the Thousand Islands, in Ontario. She was born on Howe Island, Ontario, and later moved back to Gananoque, where she died in 1939 and is buried at Willowbank Cemetery.

The first See's Candies shop and kitchen opened at 135 North Western Avenue in Los Angeles in November 1921. By the mid-1920s there were 12 shops, and thirty operated during the Great Depression. The first all-porcelain store opened in Bakersfield, California, on May 1, 1941. A San Francisco shop opened in 1936, and cream and truffle production (60% of product sales) moved to South San Francisco to take advantage of cooler average temperatures.

In 1972, the See family sold the company, which generated $4 million in pre-tax profit that year, to Berkshire Hathaway for $25 million. Blue Chip obtained a controlling interest on January 3, 1972, and later acquired 100% for $25 million. Warren Buffett has called See's 'the prototype of a dream business' (2007). Charlie Munger revealed at a 1996 luncheon that See's was the first high quality business Berkshire ever bought.

The couverture chocolate comes from nearby Guittard Chocolate Company, and nuts from Mariani Nut Company of Winters, California. On June 20, 2012, See's earned a Guinness World Record for the world's largest lollipop, a chocolate lollipop weighing 7,003 lb and measuring 4 ft long, 3 ft wide, and 5 ft high, equivalent to 145,000 regular-size lollipops. As of the source, the price of See's chocolates is more than $30 a pound.

Location and market area

See's Candies sells primarily through its own stores and at Nebraska Furniture Mart, another Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary. The company operates more than 200 stores across Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Most stores are in shopping centers, though the company also runs stand-alone stores and airport terminal locations.

More than 70% of stores are in California. International stores exist in Hong Kong, Mexico City, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Abu Dhabi (opened in 2020 at Nation Towers). Seasonally, kiosks appear in select malls during the year-end holiday season. Outside these areas, See's sells directly via mail order and online to control product age.

Operations were temporarily suspended in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first such suspension since World War II when sugar and other ingredients became hard to acquire. The company began restoring operations a month later after implementing safety precautions.

In popular culture

In 1952, Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance spent a half day at the See's Candies store on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, learning to dip chocolates and work the production line for the 'Job Switching' episode of I Love Lucy, which became one of the most popular in the show's history. Singer Cher was working at See's in 1962 when she met Sonny Bono; she quit to become his housekeeper. In a 1987 Kidsongs video 'What I Want to Be', the Kidsongs Kids visit the See's Candies factory during 'The Candy Man' song sequence.

In 1994, at the South San Francisco headquarters, a driver delivering a bulk order of chocolate fell asleep while his truck was hooked up to a vat and pumping, flooding El Camino Real and Spruce Avenue with chocolate; workers had to shovel it away from storm drains once the fog cooled it. The factory was visited to research the Sugar Rush sequence for Wreck-It Ralph. See's Candies was featured by Huell Howser in California's Gold Episode 908. The South San Francisco facility mounts oversized holiday decorations atop its plant for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Mothers' Day, and Independence Day.

On Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher's 2020 Netflix show Never Have I Ever, main character Devi Vishwakumar's mother keeps a cabinet of See's Candies as housewarming and hostess gifts.