Sweet Home Big Flats: The Story of DeMet’s Turtles and Their New York Connection

 

by Karen Meade, CCHS Volunteer

If you're ever passing through Chemung Valley on 1-86 or walking on the Sperr Memorial Park trail and catch a faint, chocolatey sweetness in the air, you'll know where it's coming from. Big Flats candy lovers have a small piece of American confectionery history, the place where a century-old Chicago dream found a new home in upstate New York.

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There’s a good chance you’ve bitten into a DeMet’s Turtle at some point in your life, that perfect little cluster of crunchy pecans, gooey caramel, and silky chocolate,and never once wondered where it came from. If you live in the Southern Tier of New York, the answer might be closer than you think.

1929, Chicago Historical Society

The story of DeMet’s Turtles begins not in New York, but in Chicago, Illinois, where candy maker George DeMet opened a shop on Madison Street in 1898. It was a classic American confectionery dream: a candy store and soda fountain where George crafted sweets by hand and built a loyal neighborhood following. By 1916, he had struck upon something truly special. It was a cluster of pecans draped in caramel and dipped in chocolate. The shape, with pecan “legs” poking out from the chocolate shell, reminded someone of a little turtle crawling across a marble board. The name stuck, and an American candy icon was born.

The Turtles brand passed through several hands over the decades, eventually landing with Nestlé in 1988, before being acquired in 2007 by Brynwood Partners, a private equity firm that resurrected the dormant DeMet’s Candy Company name and set about building something new.

When the newly reconstituted DeMet’s Candy Company began searching for a U.S. manufacturing home, they cast a wide net across the northeastern states, looking at New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. What they found in Big Flats, a small community in Chemung County just outside Elmira, checked every box.

DeMet’s selected a 17-acre parcel in the Airport Corporate Park to construct their 100,000-square-foot facility.  The location offered excellent transportation access, a strong regional labor pool, and critically, was part of New York State’s Empire Zone incentive program. This gave DeMet’s the competitive edge it needed to choose the Southern Tier over other states. To date, the project has created 250 new jobs for the region. This has been a meaningful boost for a community that, like many in upstate New York, had weathered its share of economic headwinds.

 While the iconic original Turtles clusters are primarily produced at DeMet’s facility in Scarborough, Ontario, the Big Flats plant soon became a hub for the company’s broader confectionery portfolio, including Flipz chocolate-covered pretzels and other snack products that DeMet’s brought under its umbrella after Brynwood Partners consolidated several candy brands.

 

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It’s worth pausing to appreciate just how enduring the Turtles formula really is. It consists of only three ingredients: crunchy pecans, creamy caramel, and a chocolate shell. This formula has kept candy lovers coming back for more than 100 years.  Just a simple, honest combination that George DeMet figured out more than a century ago on a marble board in Chicago.

 Today, DeMet’s is owned by Yıldız Holding, the Turkish conglomerate that also owns Godiva, and the brand sells tens of millions of units annually. But the soul of the product remains the same — and part of that soul, for the better part of two decades now, has been rooted in the quiet, hardworking community of Big Flats, New York, a local sweet spot