Provisionary: Joyva Corp.
New York Press DEPENDING ON WHOM you ask, the Brooklyn-based
Joyva Corporation is best-known for its halvah. Or maybe it's known for
the anachronous turbaned sultan that crowns its cans of tahini. Perhaps
it's for the raspberry jell rings, which are as ubiquitous at the
Passover table as they are on Korean deli counters, where they're sold
for a quarter a pop. It's telling that the
company's first product change in more than a decade, which will occur
this fall, isn't technically a new product—just a kid-friendly
repackaging of an old one. The best-selling chocolate-covered raspberry
jells have until now been available only in Russell Stover-sized and
five-pound bulk boxes, but will soon be sold individually wrapped and
three-to-a-pack. The few changes that Joyva
products have undergone in nearly 100 years may be the secret to their
staying power. The operation has been based in New York City since
1906, when Nathan Radutzky started peddling halvah on the Lower East
Side, spawning Independent Halvah, which by the 40s evolved into the
Joyva. Joyva has been producing tahini, halvah,
jell rings, marshmallow twists and sesame crunch candy in Williamsburg
for nearly 60 years. The entire operation takes place in three
buildings: one with offices and a production facility for halvah and
confections, another for warehousing and shipping, and a third
dedicated solely to sesame seed processing. The
company imports anywhere between two and three million pounds of sesame
seeds a year to make tahini, an ingredient essential to halvah. Richard
Radutzky, grandson of Nathan and son of Milton, 82, who still comes to
work every day, figures that his family's business is perhaps the
largest single importer of sesame seeds in the country. Radutzky,
a former professional actor who joined the company 16 years ago, walks
among the machinery that carries out the scrupulous tasks of sesame
seed processing—sifting, soaking, removing hulls, brining, spinning,
roasting and finally, squeezing to produce tahini. He points to a
40-pound bucket with the classic orange and brown Joyva design. "We put
it in buckets like this for pretty much every pizza and falafel store
in New York." Years ago, a problem presented
itself. "The tahini was over there," says Radutzky, "the halvah was
over here, it got a little tiresome lugging that stuff over." That
stuff would be up to 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of halvah each day. To
solve the problem, Joyva installed a pipe that pumps tahini underground
from one building to the other. In other
aspects of its production, Joyva remains decidedly old-fashioned. Most
of the halvah-making process remains unmechanized; the bars are cut by
machine, but the mixing is still done by hand. Joyva
products are sold all over the world, but here in New York, the entire
product line can be found at Economy Candy on Rivington St.
May 4, 2004
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