Who can take some toffee,
sprinkle in some nuts,
cover it in chocolate and a miracle or two?
The candy man can.
(With apologies to Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley)
HAMPSTEAD — In these parts, the candy man who can is Robert “Chocolate Bob” Newsteder, who with his partner, Barbara Finch, runs My Favorite Chocolate, a tiny store and chocolate factory that smells like Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter all rolled into one.
Newsteder makes nearly everything the store sells, from hand-formed and dipped peanut butter cups, to pecan turtles, to his proprietary formula for “Chocoffee” bars, which combine chocolate with real coffee, not coffee oil or flavoring. He also has a wholesale business making custom-labeled chocolate bars for businesses around southern New Hampshire.
But this candy man can do so much more.
Although Newsteder has made chocolate for decades, he has also done lots of other things, primarily in product design, prototyping and development for large corporations and his own business ventures. He has 18 patents to his name – including the first patent for “printing” photographs on chocolate bars.
“When I invented photos on chocolate, I could have written you a check for half a million dollars and it would have cleared,” he says.
Newsteder, a New York City native, came up with his most famous idea in the mid-1980s while fooling around with a Hershey bar in a friend’s kitchen. Inspired by scrimshaw, the old technique of engraving pictures on whale bones and walrus tusks and then filling the grooves with ink, he scratched a tic-tac-toe board on smooth chocolate with a pin and then rubbed powdered sugar over it.
Eureka! The tic-tac-toe board showed up white, as clear as a picture.
Newsteder already had a prototyping and design business, Scale Models Inc., and he began playing around with adapting the photoengraving process to make molds for chocolate.
The result was his 1987 patent on “Method of forming an image with photographic likeness on chocolate” and a company, Chocolate Pix, that made a chocolate molding set for kids.
If you bought the Chocolate Pix set – first manufactured by CAP Toys and then acquired by Kenner, which sold it alongside its wildly popular Easy Bake Ovens – you could mail away a photo of yourself and get back a custom chocolate lollipop bearing your likeness.
“I got $5 for every one of those, and there were thousands,” he says.
Two years later, Newsteder earned a new patent for his “Method of forming a multi-colored chocolate product.”
Soon, his Chocolate Pix factory in Utica, New York, was making full-color reproductions of U.S. postage stamps on chocolate bars and selling them in post offices across the country. The postal service sent them from his factory to nearly every post office in the country for free.
That business grew like crazy until someone complained that it constituted unfair competition. A new federal law or regulation said that private companies could not get free shipping, and his business abruptly closed, he says.
“I went from 33,000 customers to none in one day,” he says. “I had to lay off 53 people.”
In his heyday, Newsteder created custom-printed chocolate bars and other one-of-a-kind fancies, from promotional bars featuring the main characters in the movie “Au Chocolat” for Miramax and custom chocolate bars for politicians running for office to a 5-foot-tall chocolate bar for the premier of the 1988 comedy, “Consuming Passions,” about chocolate mixed with dead bodies.
Newsteder’s chocolate patents weren’t his first. His earliest inventions, detailed in four patents in 1969 and 1970, involved filtration systems for home aquariums. He says he invented the first, external aquarium filter using cartridges that could easily be replaced.
Other inventions of his never found buyers or partners. One example is the “candy planter,” a molded plastic, decorative holder filled with candy that could be given as a gift, then repurposed as a planter once the candy was all gone.
But that doesn’t discourage Chocolate Bob, who is still full of ideas, both patented and practical. He’s built much of his own chocolate-making machinery and continues to innovate in candy.
He’s also full of stories about his many business ups and downs, fortunes made and lost. Although he graduated from the Wharton School of Business, he’s more of an “idea man” than a businessman, he admits.
Still, he claims some interesting “firsts” that he helped design and prototype. Those include the first, vacuum-formed plastic takeout container for a McDonald’s hamburger, ceramic bowls that showed off the vegetables in Campbell’s vegetable soup, and the prototype for a futuristic J.C. Penney kitchen featuring two Radaranges, the first microwave ovens for home cooks.
Scale Models, Inc., which Newsteder ran for 50 years, was a wedding gift from his father-in-law, the sculptor Raymond Granville Barger. Newsteder and his wife, Amy Barger, eventually divorced.
Not long afterward, he met Finch, who worked for Welcome Wagon for 20 years. When the company transferred her to New Hampshire, Newsteder visited on weekends from New York, then moved to the Granite State for good after his father died. He and Finch have been together for 37 years.
“That’s why we stayed together – because we didn’t get married,” he jokes.
They opened the retail store for My Favorite Chocolate a week before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.
Now 88 years old, Newsteder is still working: “I have two metal hips, two stents and a plate in my neck – and I still put in a 10-hour workday,” he says.
He and Finch are looking to sell the business soon. But first, Chocolate Bob, ever the optimist, has one more idea for boosting his wholesale line: selling chocolate bars with people’s business cards printed on the wrapper.
“Did you ever hold a million-dollar idea in your hand?” he asks. “This is a million-dollar idea.”
This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.