Kimmie Candy

Kimmie Candy makes about 9,000 pounds of candy a day. The company has been growing 30 percent a year since Dutra relocated it from Sacramento, Calif., to Reno in 2007. He is finishing plant expansion now and anticipates he will need a larger building in 18 months. As the father of now-grown children who trick-or-treated, Dutra knows the concerns of parents who worry their children will eat too much Halloween candy. "Parents need to be cautious," he said. "When my kids came home from trick-or-treating, they would have 50 pounds. I made a decision. For the next 48 hours you can eat all you want. Eat it for breakfast. But after two days, you are done with it. After about 30 hours, the kids would come and say 'Take it all away.'?" And despite a policy that allows his 28 employees to eat as much candy as they want while on the job, none of the employees would be classified as obese or even overweight. Dutra himself, at age 60, is trim and athletic, as are his adult children, John and Kathryn, who help run the family business. Just eat candy in moderation, Dutra said. Sunbursts are about as healthy a candy as one could get, he said, describing them as chocolate-covered sunflower kernels. ChocoRocks are the company's best-seller. They are little pieces of coated chocolate that resemble tiny rocks. Dutra grew up eating Hershey's bars. And he personally sampled dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces of candy before selecting each variety to be sold by Kimmie Candy. He prefers a less sweet chocolate, one that emphasizes the cocoa. Before getting in the candy business, Dutra was a successful agribusinessman in Sacramento, where he still grows sugar beets. In the 1980s, he became senior agronomist for a wheat-farming operation in Saudi Arabia. He also was one of the founders of Westec Inc., a company that educated farmers in Brazil on growing tomatoes and developed into an international seed business. Its hybrid corn now is sold in Russia, Moldova, Egypt and other countries. Dutra named some of his vegetable creations after friends. The Kimmie name comes from the name of a girlfriend of his wife. Dutra was only a candy eater in 2000 when a business friend offered him a good deal on a 40,000-pound container of chocolate that had been shipped from Korea to California. He quickly read books on Hershey's and Mars and learned about the candy business. Then he told his wife, "?'Honey, I think I am going into the candy business.' I figured if I ever went broke, I would be able to eat the 40,000 pounds." Although Sunburst won industry taste awards in 2003, Kimmie Candy was a relatively small company. Then it relocated to Reno. "We are proud to be in Nevada," Dutra said. "The smartest move I ever made was moving to Nevada. I was ticked off by the red tape in California. There is a 9.5 percent personal income tax in California.