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Particularly tasteful edition of Lehigh Valley Rising.

The Lehigh Valley is a cornucopia of culinary delights to tempt any palate, be it mouthwatering, chocolaty goodness, sweet, gooey sensations, or simply salty or savory.

It's a safe bet that if there's a sinfully flavorful snack you crave, someone's making it right here in the Lehigh Valley.

Our first story begins in Redding, Pennsylvania, in 1904.

That's the year Josh Early started out in the wholesale candy business.

Five generations later, the early family is still involved in this sweet endeavor.

And we're a fifth generation family run business that makes candy in the most traditional way.

Our 1 pound assorted is probably the best representation of our quality.

It's about 30 different varieties of all handmade chocolates that are family recipes.

Everything is handmade using processes that are so far outdated.

It's putting us on quite a unique island This is our friend machine.

This machine is the original piece.

It's over 80 years old and it works for us to this day.

I'm most proud of the fact that I get to say that I'm part of the fifth generation of Josh Hurley family members to be carrying on the legacy.

Was started in 1904.

It was my great great grandfather that had a wholesale business and running Pennsylvania early as old fashioned chocolates and it was in the sixties that my grandfather started his own brand called Josh Hurley Candies and moved it in the Lehigh Valley.

I can remember as a kid coming in with my father, he would always ask me if I wanted to come and crack chocolate or sweep floors, but I officially started in 2000 when I graduated college.

My favorite piece of candy would have to be the dark chocolate, habanero, c salt caramel.

It is the perfect blend of spicy and sweet.

There is a habanero sea salt topping on a vanilla caramel and it's absolutely decadent.

My favorite, Josh Shirley Candy is definitely dark almond bark.

It is the perfect balance of salty, sweet chocolate crunch in there.

It's fantastic.

We market the fact that you can come in here and try any piece of candy.

Hey, welcome to the Josh Hurley Kitchen.

This is where we cook all of our chocolates and can right now we are cooking one of our top sellers, the vanilla butter cream.

We're a classic H20 business where we probably do about 80% of our business and 20% of the year for the weeks leading up to Christmas and Easter are certainly our busiest.

Karen has been cooking for over an hour in that hour.

All of the cream and butter and sugar is caramelized and got the real rich, deep caramel flavors that we're looking for.

We're very careful not to chase too much niche things.

Seasonal caramels we identified a couple of years ago as being a flavor profile that was becoming more and more popular.

So all we did was take our traditional vanilla caramel and made our own version of it.

This is our roving line.

This is the piece of machinery that takes an uncoated candy and covers it in chocolate.

We have Georgia here putting on our molasses sponge that already was coated once.

It's now getting a second coat of chocolate.

This is a roving machine, has a.

Curtain that fully in cases that molasses sponge before coming through the other side We're Laura Marks each and every piece.

This is where we take off our finished piece of chocolate and that will go out in our shop later today for sale.

We employ about 64 employees at any one time.

I'm proud to be able to sit here and say there's nothing that I wouldn't ask someone to do that I have not done myself.

And I think that's an important ingredient.

It's not it's not the end all, be all.

But I think it's part of our secret sauce I've been here 22 years and certainly COVID19 was the greatest challenge we've ever faced.

We were making candy quicker than we were selling it at the time when the pandemic hit and ultimately shut our doors at about the three week mark before the holiday.

Ultimately, we were left with half a season's worth of chocolates with no one to sell it to.

So we turned it into an opportunity by starting a You've been a good campaign, and we took all of our Easter chocolates and donated into local hospitals, churches, police, fire, any kind of volunteer.

We set up a pick up routine at our back door.

We would just give the candy away for free.

It was a good way for us to kind of give back, and we got wonderful feedback on that.

Community engagement is very important to us.

We do a lot with a number of non-profits.

The Women's Five K Breast Cancer Walk is an annual walk they do in October every year.

For at least the last 15 years, we've been selling pink umbrellas.

Every October we take 100% of the purchase price of those nonprofits and donate it to the women's five K We're very fortunate to be a staple in this area.

We have customers that will come in 23 even four generations of families literally walking through our doors and telling us stories on how they can remember walking in here when they were kids.

And now they're coming in our same doors with their grandchildren.

And it just means the world to us.

My parents have spent a lifetime in this business and are closing the door on that chapter of their lives.

So it's my brother and my hope that we can carry that legacy on not only through our generation, but for generations to come and make my parents and grandparents very proud in that process.

Just off Route 33 in Palmer Township resides a family run snack factory that has been in business for over 75 years, delivering crunchy finger licking goodness.

The career family business better known as Keystone Snacks, has thrived, grown and is ready to expand into the future.

220 full time employees.

Most the people they when we started working here, they stayed for years because we weren't like their family.

We're kind of easygoing here.

We aren't standing over their shoulders watching them work in a good environment.

They treat as well.

We have had deep, deep roots in this area.

My great grandfather actually came over here from Italy during the time that Mussolini was taken over.

This is actually a picture of me as a as a toddler with my father and grandfather and their hold me over an oven here.

You know, it's it's like my father told me, you know, son, everything the oil touches is your kingdom the company makes a variety of salty snack foods, make tortilla chips.

We make corn chips, baked cheese curls, baked cheese puffs and fried cheese curl.

This is the mesa.

This is our ground up corn meal.

We're going to put this stir the cedar and then cut it into those tortilla shake my favorite snack, that's like asking me what's my favorite kid?

I would have to say, everybody.

Move.

Me.

Farty mix.

You know, you can't have a party without party mix.

Party mix is the tortilla chips, the corn chips, the fried cheese curls.

And then we add pretzels my grandfather and his brothers, they were working at the factory at the end the night and they were sweeping up the floor.

They're sweeping the tortilla chips.

They're sweeping the nachos and the pretzels.

And my grandfather looked at it and said, you know, this stuff all looks pretty good together.

I got an idea.

Let's put this in a bag and we'll call for Sweepings.

Oh, wow.

Thank God they didn't call it that.

And it came to apartments, but that's how it got started.

So we just had our 75th anniversary last year.

That makes this year 76 years in business.

Being flexible is what's allowed us to stay in business for all these years.

Keystone Snacks used to have a variety of our own snacks over the years.

We turn more the business into co manufacturing.

Co manufacturing is making product for other people who don't have a brick and mortar operation.

So we make the bag and they own the label.

We've worked with two large nationally recognized brands, like mentioned the brands this is the final step in the manufacturing of our product.

Bag is made, the packer puts it in a carton, takes it, puts it on a pallet, and it goes into the warehouse we have a lot of equipment here in the plant that has that is coming up on age.

I mean, one of the friars, my grandfather welded that thing together.

Right now, I'm a little bit constrained with the building that I have.

I can't get the equipment that I want to get it.

I can't make certain cookies, crackers, certain high protein products, high fiber products.

The plant based protein products are not able to make.

Now, I will have that capacity to make in the new building, the facility we're standing in this room, plus the other room is 108,000 square feet.

And in about two and a half years, another 114,000 square feet will be added.

So with the expansion, we're doubling our footprint and that is going to create more jobs in the area.

So I can make those things that consumers are looking for, the foods that are out there that are looking to be good for you.

And also, you know, those ones that are just good for your soul.

Just as important as it is to reinvest in your business, it's that much more important to reinvest in the community that cultivated and nurtured it even today, we still give to churches, charities and organizations that reach out to us happily one of the best piece of advice that my dad gave me is a Billy always hire people smarter than you.

And I said, That'll be easy.

Everybody here just real tight.

Each other and half of us have been here for ever, and the opportunities are boundless here.

I can get involved in a lot of different things as I have over the years.

I've surrounded myself with a lot of smart people.

I surround myself with good people to propel the company into the future, building our own brand and building Keystone Snacks here in the Lehigh Valley.

What started out as homemade, delicious breakfast fair for guests staying at the Bethlehem Inn has been transformed into a recipe for success.

The inn may have closed, but the granola factory still serves up a variety of granola and baked goods to folks around the valley and around the country.

This granola factory really is the best granola.

When you're talking flavor and texture.

Our granola is hands and above anything else, on that shelf my mother, Suzanne, my father, Robert, they loved the idea of a bed and breakfast.

They wanted to open one here in Bethlehem.

So they they went through a lot of hoops and and getting approved to open up A, B, and B in downtown Bethlehem in 1988.

And with a bed and breakfast, you need a breakfast so my mother came up with the recipe for granola and she served it every day and never liked it because as a kid I'd always pick them out.

You just really took a liking to it.

Over the years, people come back, they ask for it, people ask if they would sell it.

In 2006, when granola started to become a product in grocery stores, my father Robert proposed the idea of trying to build a business with him.

When Wegmans moved into the Lehigh Valley, the local store was receptive to the products, and they brought him in there and then brought him to a couple other stores in the area.

At that point, my parents need to expand.

And then in 2006, my parents opened up a bakery.

I'm Casey and we're here in the production facility.

This is where all of the granola gets baked.

Pulled and packaged so all of our.

Granola is made in small.

Batches.

It starts with a dry mix of products, spices.

A lot of our grandmothers will use a blend of honey and butter that will bring together and then mix with that dry mix.

We do have a plant based granola that's called Good Vibrations that uses extra virgin olive oil.

Once it is fully mixed, it will go into a bin.

And we have a person who portions it out by weight so that each tray bakes evenly, and then we spread it on the tray and get it prepped on the sheet rock to go into the oven.

You'll see in our production process we realize three ingredients real people, the people behind it, connected to the product, making sure that we continue to make this as close to the way my mother did back in 1988 when she was doing it one tray at a time.

The original honey pecan is original nothing's changed and we've just added new flavors.

On average, we fill about 800 bags a day.

We've got about 500 stores across the East Coast and into the Midwest that we're supplying.

We're actually expanding this summer into the South.

So Whole Foods Market is going to be adding us into their stores in all of the Southern and Florida region.

About 79 stores down there.

We are partnering with Los Tavern Brewery.

We just came out with a new granola called Toffee Almond Granola Clusters, and they are making an English nut brown ale to go along with it.

We have Ali in Pennsylvania.

When it comes to a food operation, it's such a perfect location to hit such a large population of people along the East Coast and into the Midwest.

And from a supply chain perspective, I mean, you have so many suppliers that are within a 60 to 90 mile range that can deliver to us within a day or two.

We have the best, highest quality ingredients we're sourcing from local partners.

It really just makes all of our products that much better.

In our very first episode of Lehigh Valley Rising, we featured this next company when they were still in their infancy and finding their legs in manufacturing at the factory incubator in Bethlehem ten months later and Stuffed Puffs is all grown up, putting a delicious spin on a classic favorite in a factory of their own and we've doubled in size in the last ten months, and we'll probably double in size in the next ten months.

So the facility we're sitting in now is 165,000 square feet.

We can fit five of our highly proprietary high speed lines here, and each line can do north of $150 million in the past and.

Just three years ago we were clanking on a pipe and hoping something would come out in a 10,000 square foot rented space with older equipment.

This is upper echelon and the talent that we've been able to bring in and continue to bring in, it is a dream come true to see where we're at it took us a week to make our first pallet.

We make a pallet in a matter of minutes now.

Incredible stuff.

Puff is a chocolate filled marshmallow, so when you roast it over a fire, it melts from the inside out so this actually came from sitting around a campfire.

I have a classically trained food background and I worked in a couple of three Michelin star fine dining restaurants and one summer in 22,009, I was sitting around a campfire and I was trying to roast a marshmallow to make a perfect s'more.

And every time I did it, I realized I couldn't make the perfect s'more because the chocolate never melted.

And so I ripped a marshmallow apart and put some chocolate inside seemed to back up and roasted over the fire.

And lo and behold, it melted from the inside out.

And that was this aha moment.

Like, I invented the wheel moment for me.

And really, that was the spark that set this whole thing into motion.

In the early days.

It was it was crazy.

Like most people would start up some talk about.

I built these rube Goldberg machines in my basement at my mom's house to try and come up with the technology to fill a marshmallow.

So once I got to a place where we had some some success, I started going to a lot of the major household brand names, manufacturing sites.

I thought I was walking in and opening Pandora's Box for someone.

And what I realized is I didn't have a good idea at all.

Take out my samples and we're showing showing the product and I'm all excited.

CEO of the company leans over the table and looks at me.

He goes, Son, do you not think we thought of this?

People are landing rockets back on pads in the middle of the ocean.

Don't tell me we can't put chocolate inside of a marshmallow.

Was my my kind of thinking.

So my name is Hannah O'Bryan.

I am a product development scientist here at stuff passed that I'm able to be in a product area where I can see my product on the shelves and work with it every day.

And I just have such passion for working for this awesome company, working on products and letting my creative side out we start with our concept from our marketing team, and then it's handed over to us in R&D where we start bringing that product to life.

So we're working in the lab, taking flavors and adding it into our marshmallow and trying it out and tasting it and seeing how it works.

So this is our core products that we started with.

So it started with our classic milk chocolate, which is the chocolate in the center.

This is what they look like.

They're very delicious.

You can make them into s'mores, you can roast them.

There's so many stories I could tell you about stuffed puffs.

The one word that comes to mind constantly is resilience.

What's that like four minute mile concept?

Variety of no one ran a four minute mile, and then one person did, and.

Then everyone could run a four minute mile.

But I think what made this work is that we didn't stop from we're always going to keep pushing and we're always going to keep trying to refine and keep dialing the process and the product and making it better and better and better as we go Michael Tierney, CEO and creator of Stuffed Puffs, isn't just a wizard business.

He's a marvel in the kitchen, as well as a special treat for our season finale.

We invited Mike over to the PBS 39 studios where he showed me some surprising and delicious recipes you can make with his confectionery invention.

Well, my mouth is watering.

Why don't we get started?

Sure.

We begin.

So first we're going to make the stuff puff, toffee, caramel, Rice Krispie treats.

So really simple recipe.

You can do it at home with the kids and with the family.

We'll just take a medium sized pot over medium high heat.

We'll drop in a few ounces of butter, get that melted, OK?

And then we're going to melt in an entire bag of stuff.

So just like when you make stir, sure.

You can be on sturdy or just like when you make a normal Rice Krispie treat.

Same process flow.

But the difference here is we've got all this extra chocolate on the inside that really makes them a special treat.

So we'll drop these in.

You can keep stirring.

We'll get those all melted up.

We're getting close.

So now we're going to add a couple of toffee bits just to get a little bit of crunch, a little extra flavor in here.

And we'll get that stirred up Nice.

OK, done this before.

Oh, I'm excited.

I will be by the time.

You will be by the time we're done.

And we're going to add our cereal in.

OK.

So go ahead and give that a stir.

Right.

How much of that cereal now?

That's six cups for a bag of stuff.

Right.

Oh, so you're on a trade?

Yeah, sure.

So we're just going to kind of fold that cereal in so we get all the marshmallow incorporated in there.

It really makes a fun, sticky mess.

This seems like something someone could make with their kids over the summer.

Yeah, this is an easy, easy recipe at night for the family.

And then, you know, you can pack these in school lunches the next day or if they make it that far.

Right.

Sometimes they get all eaten out of the tray.

Right.

So all we've done is we've taken a Pyrex pan, lined it with a little parchment so it doesn't stick.

And then what we're going to do is just transfer it from the pot to the pan, and then we'll use the back of our spatula to kind of square it out, moving it out.

And then this will cool on your counter for 30, 45 minutes.

And then from there, we'll cut it to a little caramel drizzle and some seasoning.

And so when that's all said and done, you end up with some nice stuff.

Puff, toffee, Rice Krispie Square.

Yes.

We'll drizzle a little caramel sauce over the top and then hit it with a little sea salt.

And you've got a very elevated Rice Krispie treat for your next backyard party.

Fantastic.

What other recipe have you got for us today?

Sure.

So we are going to do a kind of a spin on an orange martini like stuffed puff creamsicle.

Really?

Martini for the eight, for the adult, for the adults.

Yeah, but you can make this a nonalcoholic version if you wanted to.

We're not going to today.

And so really easy recipe.

What we've done is we've taken some stuff puffs on a baking sheet, OK?

And we've put them in the oven at 350 for about five or 6 minutes.

And really what we're trying to do is just give them a little color, a little toast, add a little of that campfire flavor to it.

Yes.

So what we'll do is we'll just load these into our blender here.

And this is just a full eight stuff puffs that are in here.

So we can just take this parchment, right?

Like this kind of right into the blender, scrape a much of this off as we can get all that good, chocolaty, delicious center that's all melted in there.

And they have simply been baked.

They're just on a piece of parchment over 350 heat for about four or 5 minutes.

And then what we'll do from here is we'll add a cup of half and half, OK, and we'll get this all blended up together.

Now, how do you get these recipes?

So we have some fun in the kitchen.

We have an R&D lab in our facility that allows us to innovate products that we bring to market, like our new line of big bites, coated stuff, puffs.

But we also have fun in the kitchen playing around with some recipes for the team.

But allowed.

But we'll get this moving and so all we're looking to do here is blend all of that warm gooey marshmallow.

So it's a smooth consistency.

Got it.

Almost has a shake consistency, too.

Yeah, like almost like a milkshake.

And then we're going to add one cup of our orange juice.

Right two ounces, two and a half ounces of an orange flavored vodka.

But you can use a different orange flavor liquor if you'd like to taste or yeah, a little bit more depending on depending on your mood.

And then a half an ounce of driver Muth, we'll blend this all together, give it another one, and that's pretty much it.

We'll just pour this over a martini glass.

These will be a little bit warmer.

Like a dessert espresso style martini.

But you could easily do this over ice as well if you wanted to.

But you get a little bit of that viscosity from the marshmallows like that milkshake.

Like an adult milkshake in a martini.

Right.

Really?

That looks delicious.

And we'll garnish that with a few pieces of orange.

And if you'd like you could throw a little orange peel on there as well.

And and off you go.

Wow.

You know, adding the garnish really does tell me you have a culinary background.

Thanks.

Well, this is terrific.

Why don't we close this out with a little toast?

Sure.

But instead of with these some stuff.

Here you go.

Right.

Here's my friend.

Here we go.

Try not thinking out of the box, but thinking inside the marshmallow.

Perfect.

Thanks again, Mike, and thank you for watching.

We'll be back in the fall with a new season of Lehigh Valley Rising.

But you can catch this episode and all past episodes at our website, PBS.

39 dot org.

From all of us here, I'm Grover Silcox.

We'll see you again next time.

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