(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Like a kid in a candy store, you've probably heard the phrase.

For Kyle Truax, he grew up in one.

- I'd always ask for the end of the piece of the taffy.

My uncle Dave who used to work here, and he'd always cut it out, and so I'd always get the last piece of taffy out of the machine.

- I've watched a lot of kids grow up over the last 20 years, and you see 'em every single summer.

- [Narrator] No other candy has made sweet memories at the beach like salt water taffy.

(upbeat music) (people talking indistinctly) - My grandparents started it in 1963, I probably started working here when I was 14.

- They've always made taffy.

My wife and I, while we were dating in high school, and her grandparents owned the candy store.

I started working here in high school in 1997, then working full time in 2002 after graduating from college, and became an owner shortly after.

25 tons of taffy is what we make every year.

Right now through labor day, we'll be making taffy every day.

There may be a day or two that we don't, but it's pretty much every single day.

- [Narrator] Wait, before we go any further, what exactly is saltwater taffy?

It's molten sugar, more or less.

For much of history, sugar was rare, but by the 1800's, colonial sugar plantations in the Caribbean had flooded the market, and that sugar rush led to all kinds of sweet treats, including mass production of taffy and its cousin toffee.

They have similar recipes, both are made of sugar or molasses, boiled with water or milk, but their textures are what set them apart.

Toffee cools and becomes hard, while taffy is stretched and pulled, which traps tiny air pockets, making it chewy.

So what's the deal with saltwater taffy?

Its birthplace was Atlantic City New Jersey in the 1880's.

Chew on this bit of history.

A candy store on the city's boardwalk flooded, and seawater soaked all of the shops taffy.

Afterward, the shop owner joked that he had new candy to sell, saltwater taffy, and the name stuck.

And the so called salty treat has since become a classic coastal indulgence, from Atlantic to Pacific.

(upbeat music) - There's not really saltwater in it, but it's kind of like hey, (Kyle laughs) it's close to the beach, you know let's go get some saltwater taffy.

- I have a customer up in Alaska, and he calls his taffy glacier water taffy.

We do put salt in one of our taffies, and that's our sea salt taffy.

You start with the raw ingredients, and for us it's corn syrup, sugar, coconut oil, soy lecithin, and then once it's cooked we color and flavor it.

And then we will cool the taffy on our cooling tables.

We'll pull the taffy, get it to the right consistency, and then we'll put it in our batch roller, and the batch roller will roll it around and get it to the right size, and then it'll feed through the machine that will cut and wrap all the taffy.

And our machine is set for 140 pieces a minute.

Part of our thing is our taffy that we make right here is we add a lot of flavor to it, because that is so important.

Taffy's a flavored blob of sugar, if you don't put enough flavor in there, I mean what are we doing here?

Oh is that your favorite?

Yeah licorice, well it's one of the most popular.

- I had some person last week from Wisconsin was like, "Oh I really like the sour grape."

I'm like, "Cool man," he's like, "You guys have the best ever."

We have people back east order our taffy.

I'm like, "You know there's closer places to get this?"

They're like, "Yeah but it's not the same."

Bruce's makes over three dozen taffy's, each with its own unique design and flavor.

And everyone can pick out a favorite.

- Meet a lot of different people that come in to the candy store, just watching through the window, watching all the process.

- There is this magic piece here where we can erase all of our worries and just focus on this machine here, and watch it work, it's a good thing for us.

- [Narrator] There's no saltwater in it, it wasn't invented here, but for generations of Oregon kids and kids at heart, taffy has been one of the signature tastes of the Oregon coast.

(upbeat music continues)