fb-pixelIn biotech hub Cambridge, there’s still room for Junior Mints - The Boston Globe Skip to main content

In biotech hub Cambridge, there’s still room for Junior Mints

The Tootsie Roll plant is something of a throwback to a time when Cambridge was a much different place than the biotechnology hub it has become.Scott Kirsner for the Boston Globe/File 2018

A lot of old Cambridge has gone away. But Junior Mints appear to be forever.

Tootsie Roll Industries Inc. is planning a modest expansion of the century-old factory where it produces the entire world’s supply of Junior Mints (along with Charleston Chews and Sugar Babies, though not Tootsie Rolls).

Representatives of a Tootsie Roll subsidiary will go before the Cambridge Planning Board next month with a proposal to add 10,000 square feet to the company’s 146,000-square-foot plant on a quiet stretch of Main Street between Kendall and Central squares. In documents filed with the city, Cambridge Brands Inc., said it needs the room to upgrade aging electrical equipment, a sign that it plans to keep the plant — and approximately 200 jobs — in Cambridge for some time to come.

Advertisement



A spokeswoman for the company, which rarely communicates with the media or candy industry analysts, declined comment. But Tootsie Roll has spoken with neighborhood groups, who support the plans.

“While we are seeing a net loss of manufacturing, here is a brand that wants to keep its roots in Cambridge,” wrote Michael Monestine, executive director of the Central Square Business Association, in a letter to the planning board.

The expansion of a manufacturing plant is unusual in a part of town where aging factories and empty lots often sell for enormous sums of money and are often converted into high-end lab space for drug manufacturers — or fancy apartments for the people who work at those companies.

The Tootsie Roll plant is something of a throwback to a time when Cambridge was a much different place than the biotechnology hub it has become. The company’s workers — many of them immigrants — operate machines that last year made 26.5 million pieces of candy every day.

Candy makers once dominated the East Cambridge neighborhood where Tootsie Roll’s factory is located. In 1946, about 66 companies produced candy, chocolates, and cookies in the city, pumping out sweets ranging from Necco wafers to Fig Newtons and Squirrel Nut zippers.

Advertisement



Today, they’re nearly all gone. The Necco plant is a lab for Swiss drug maker Novartis, and Squirrel lives on only as the name of an apartment building.

Tootsie Roll is housed in an unremarkable white building with bricked-over windows next to a U-Haul rental lot. The only clue as to what goes on inside is a small sign with the company’s brown, white, and red logo.

The expansion wouldn’t do much to change that. Documents filed with the Planning Board dismiss the “active, people-oriented spaces” Cambridge prefers — like, say, tours of the candy-making area — because of “the security issues inherent in operating a food manufacturing facility.” Even proper windows are off the table — the company cited “Safe Quality Food regulations” in its filing.

But Tootsie Roll’s plans do make one concession to the curious: It proposes creating three murals on the fence of its employee parking lot across the street that would “feature the long history of candy manufacturing in Cambridge.”

Perhaps the plan means the company would contribute another chapter to that sweet story.


Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bytimlogan.