Zingerman's Candy Manufactory Turns Sugar Into Something Serious
The third stop on our tour of the Zingerman's universe. On Plaza Drive, a small team makes candy by hand, and the Zzang! Bar is only the beginning.
I mentioned the Zzang! Bar in my Bakehouse piece. Called it "better than any candy bar has a right to be," which I meant, but I also underestimated the operation behind it. The Zzang! Bar is not a side project. It's the flagship product of an entire candy-making business that shares space with the Creamery at 3723 Plaza Drive, and the bar itself is only one line in a catalog that runs deeper than I expected.
This is the third entry in our tour of the Zingerman's universe, after the Bakehouse and the Creamery. If the Bakehouse is infrastructure and the Creamery is craft dairy, the Candy Manufactory is the operation that proves Zingerman's can turn anything into a serious production if the people doing the work care enough.
The Zzang! Bar
Let me go deeper on this than I did last time. The Zzang! Bar is a layered candy bar: a base of handmade caramel, a thick layer of roasted Virginia peanuts, and a coating of dark chocolate. It weighs more than you expect. The first bite cracks through the chocolate shell, hits the peanut layer (salty, crunchy, packed tight), and then you reach the caramel.
The caramel is the reason this bar exists. It's cooked in small batches on the stovetop, stirred by hand, and pulled at a specific temperature that gives it a buttery, almost burnt-sugar quality without crossing into bitter. It stretches when you bite into it. It sticks to your teeth in a way that would be a flaw in a lesser caramel but here feels intentional, like the candy is asking you to slow down and pay attention.
A Zzang! Bar costs around $5. That's expensive for a candy bar and cheap for what it actually is. Industrial candy bars are made by machines in factories. This one is made by people in a kitchen, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a candy bar you eat without thinking and one you remember.
They also make a Zzang! Bark: broken pieces of the same chocolate-peanut-caramel combination, sold in bags. It's the Zzang! Bar without the structure, which means you eat more of it faster, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your self-control.
The Toffee
The English-style toffee is the product that surprised me most. I don't normally buy toffee. Most commercial toffee is either too sweet or too hard, and it tends to taste like it was made six months ago regardless of when you bought it.
Zingerman's toffee is different. It snaps clean. The butter flavor comes through first, then sugar, then a slow warmth that builds at the back of your mouth. It's coated in dark chocolate and finished with sea salt. Each batch is small enough that the toffee is fresh when you buy it. You can tell because it doesn't have that stale, waxy quality that old toffee develops. A tin costs around $12 to $18 depending on the size.
I bought a tin as a gift. I opened it in the car to try one piece. I gave the gift half-empty and didn't feel bad about it.
The Brittle and the Caramels
Peanut brittle follows the same philosophy: real ingredients, small batches, cooked by hand. The brittle is thin, shattered into irregular pieces, and loaded with peanuts. It's not the thick, tooth-threatening brittle you get from a holiday gift basket. It's delicate enough to crack between your fingers and sturdy enough to hold up in a bag without turning to powder.
The caramels are sold individually wrapped in small boxes. Soft, buttery, and seasoned. The sea salt version is the one I keep buying. They make seasonal flavors too. Each caramel is the same handmade stuff that goes into the Zzang! Bar, just portioned into its own wrapper. A box of 12 runs roughly $15.
The Process
What makes the Candy Manufactory worth writing about, beyond the products themselves, is how the work gets done. This is a small team working with copper pots, stovetop burners, and manual tools. The caramel is stirred by hand because temperature and texture need to be judged by feel. The toffee is poured onto slabs and spread by hand. The Zzang! Bars are assembled, layered, and cut by hand.
None of this scales efficiently. That's the point. The reason the caramel in a Zzang! Bar tastes different from the caramel in a mass-produced candy bar is that someone stood over a pot watching the color change and pulled it at the right second. You cannot automate that judgment. You can only train it.
The operation sits inside the same building as the Creamery, sharing 3723 Plaza Drive. You can buy candy at the Creamery's retail counter. You can also find Zzang! Bars at the Bakehouse, the Deli, and through Zingerman's Mail Order. But buying it at the source, where you can see the production space through the window and smell sugar cooking, adds something. Context doesn't change the flavor, but it changes how you think about what you're eating.
Plaza Drive, Part Three
Three pieces into this series, and Plaza Drive keeps revealing itself. The Bakehouse handles bread. The Creamery handles cheese and gelato. The Candy Manufactory handles sugar. All three share the same unglamorous stretch of south-side Ann Arbor, near the airport, across from warehouses and parking lots.
There is no reason, based on geography alone, to expect any of this. You drive to a commercial strip, park in a shared lot, and walk into buildings where people are making food by hand with the kind of care that most consumers never see. The Candy Manufactory is the smallest of the three operations and in some ways the most obsessive. When your entire product line depends on getting caramel right, you either get it right or you don't have a business.
They get it right. One pot at a time, stirred by hand, pulled at the moment it turns from good to worth driving to Plaza Drive for.
Zingerman's Candy Manufactory shares space with the Creamery at 3723 Plaza Dr, Ann Arbor. Candy is available at the Creamery retail counter, the Bakehouse, the Deli, and via Zingerman's Mail Order.