Feature article
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Microwave turns MoonPies into decadent treat
By Fred Sauceman
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The Chattanooga Bakery once turned out Butterette Dainties, Imp Ginger Snaps, Lookout Brand Lemon Drop Cakes, Mace Jumbles, Jersey Cream Lunch Biscuits, and Lookout Bran Biscuits, known as the Cracker of Life. But by the late 1950s, the markets for all those products had crumbled, in favor of the chocolate-covered marshmallow sandwich known as the MoonPie, born in 1917.
The Chattanooga Bakery was founded in the early 1900s to use excess flour produced by the Mountain City Flour Mill. As Tory Johnston, current vice president of marketing for MoonPie, explains, the MoonPie first took shape in the coal-mining country of Southern Appalachia, when Earl Mitchell, general manager of the Mountain City Flour Mill, was working a sales route in Eastern Kentucky.
“He was talking to coal miners at a little country store, and at the time our sales in that area were slowing down. He asked the miners what they would like to see the company make, and a coal miner said he loved melting marshmallow and dipping Graham crackers in it. As the legend goes, he described what the product might be. He didn’t say round or anything at the time, he said it just needs to be those flavors, marshmallow and graham, dipped in chocolate.
“The miner said everybody’s cutting sizes back, and you need to make it big. The moon was coming up over the horizon, and he said, ‘Why don’t you make it that big?’ He framed the moon with his fingers, with his rounded hands. Earl Mitchell finished his sales calls, came back and shared that story inside the bakery, and as it turned out, we could in fact make what was described. We could put marshmallow on or in a graham cookie and dunk it in chocolate. Some person in the plant, we’ll never know who, said ‘You ought to call it a MoonPie.’ Luckily for us, somebody had the foresight and the wisdom to trademark it.”
Tory was born in Chattanooga, where he says he grew to appreciate the lore and the stature of MoonPies. After earning a psychology degree at the University of North Carolina, an MBA from the University of Virginia, and working as a banker in Atlanta and Charlotte, he became MoonPie’s first marketing person in 1997.
“The owner of MoonPie called, and this is a stunning thing, he said we’ve never had a marketing person,” Tory told me. “He said it’s getting more competitive and we can’t continue to succeed on our name and the fact that we’re this wonderful, loved snack. We’ve got to get a lot more pro-active and a lot more professional about it.”
On a tour of the MoonPie plant, we follow the path of a 2,000-pound mass of raw dough as it’s massaged and stamped into MoonPies. We pass a 200-foot-long oven and what Tory calls a waterfall of flavor, a solid curtain of chocolate. He stops at two trash bins containing a few misshapen MoonPies. These rejects from the production process are headed for area farms, destined to be food for pigs. In 1999, when machinery had to be retooled for the production of the company’s first mini MoonPies, more scrap MoonPies than usual came off the line, and the pigs profited, up to a point. The company soon began getting calls to halt the pigs’ portions for awhile, since more waste was being generated than the pigs in the Southeast could handle.
From the original chocolate icing, the product line has expanded to banana, orange, vanilla, lemon, and strawberry. The company is considering what it calls dual-filled items, with a layer of caramel along with the marshmallow. The most recent addition to the line is a sprinkled MoonPie.
“We’ve dressed the chocolate up with a kaleidoscope, a rainbow, of sprinkles,” Tory says. “Kids love that.”
I’m always amazed at the number of people who don’t know about the transformation that occurs when MoonPies marry with microwaves. A MoonPie is matte finish. Expose it to microwave heat and the icing becomes high gloss, the marshmallow filling a viscous, luscious goo. Our microwave is 1985 vintage, so to heat the MoonPie to the desired point when it almost explodes, we key in 19 seconds for a standard-sized pie.
“I don’t know how it started, but everybody, even in this building, will tell you it’s the best way to eat a MoonPie,” Tory says. “Even if it’s a stale MoonPie, even if it’s past its code date, microwaving brings it right back to its youth. It is decadent. A lot of people will put ice cream on it and make their own little sundaes, with a cherry on top. My children — Hill, Ben, and Jan — peel the top cookie layer off with knife and put peanut butter on it. Sometimes they’ll put peanut butter and jelly on it and recap it. A lot of people slice up bananas and put them on MoonPies.”
Tory says the state of North Carolina registers the highest per capita consumption rate of MoonPies in America, and he attributes that fact to the large number of small towns in the state that were once home to many independently-owned grocery stores where MoonPies were initially sold. And as for the legendary pairing of MoonPies with Royal Crown Cola, David Magee, in his book “MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack,” says the relationship between the two products is something neither the MoonPie people nor the RC people ever promoted.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Great Depression, a dime bought both, the biggest, most portable snack available and the largest soft drink on the market — the working person’s lunch. Since its introduction during World War I, the MoonPie has occupied a place among the South’s most celebrated icons. Owners of the company estimate sales of about four billion MoonPies.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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