Esther Price celebrates its centennial year

When she was 14, in her home economics class, Esther Price began learning how to make chocolates and caramels. Perhaps motivated to get a good grade or find a new hobby, these skills that Price acquired would serve her years later, changing the trajectory of her life.

After establishing her family and falling on hard times, Price would come back to her craft. Creating a selection of fudge, Price went knocking door to door throughout Dayton, hoping to sell her candy to help support her family.

“Just the confidence to go knock on the door as a female in the ’20s—and to be successful—it’s such a great story,” says Todd Summers, vice president of Marketing and Sales at Esther Price Candies. That story would continue playing out for the next hundred years.

In 1926, Price would turn her door knocking into a full-blown company, making chocolates and other confections out of her house on Wayne Avenue in Dayton. Today, the company is alive and well, operating out of that same house on Wayne Avenue along with a few other plants throughout the Cincinnati and Dayton area.

Recognizable by its gold box and red ribbon, Esther Price confections are still a staple of the area. “Everything is done the same,” says Summers. “The quality has never changed—which is obviously why we’re still here 100 years later.”

This dedication is perhaps a product of the fact that the company has only changed hands once in its 100-year history. After retiring in the 1970s, Price sold her company to four men, with one of them, Jim Day, eventually becoming the sole owner of the company. Today, Day’s son-in-law, Doug Dressman, is the CEO. “We’re still family oriented,” Summers says.

Other ways that the company hangs onto its past is seen in its production, which largely remains the same. While the company did add some automation in 2020, the company still creates its chocolate by hand with its full-time staff of roughly 120 people.

“Ninety percent of our products are still handmade,” Summers says. “Our beaters were made in the 1930s and ’40s. They’re still here.”

This is just one adhesion to the standards that Price put in place.

“She was very, very particular about how her product was displayed,” Summers says. At a time when grocery stores weren’t air conditioned, Price would make sure that her candies weren’t stored in the sun. It’s this that gave way to Price’s candy famously being stored in the fridge bunkers at grocery stores.

“We come in through dairy and milk, our candy—it still says—treat like butter,” Summers says. “If it melts, it’s a bad thing on her. So she would go back in stores and buy her product back.”

Price’s meticulousness may have seemed exacting, but this emphasis on quality is perhaps the reason that the brand has lasted since its 1926. In the decades that followed—through World War II, periods of rationing and the economic swings of the 20th century—the brand’s steadiness has become something to celebrate.

“Every box that leaves our facility represents the work of a team that takes pride in doing things the right way, even when no one is watching,” Jennifer McElroy, vice president of operations says, noting that the company’s centennial milestone belongs to the employees who have passed down knowledge, habits and pride across generations.

“Everything that’s happened and they survived and thrived, I do believe it’s because [the candy is] something that makes people feel good. And the goal with your candy stores, you should never come in and not leave smiling,” Summers says. “It’s a feel-good item… If you have something on that says Esther Price, you’re going to have somebody approach you and tell you a story about their mom, their grandma, their aunt, their uncle.”

Of course, not only has Esther Price survived, but it’s thrived as well. From starting out as a simple door-to-door business to becoming a formal company in 1926, the company has expanded numerous times. Namely, the company expanded into the Cincinnati region in the ‘70s, after Day took over, as he wanted to bring the Dayton icon to Cincinnati.

The brand hasn’t expanded more in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean that Esther Price doesn’t want to get its chocolates into as many hands as possible. While those who aren’t in the area can’t run and grab a box of the candies from their nearest grocer, the brand does ship nationwide. This means, according to Summers, that the brand has fans in all 50 states.

“We’re a staple of Dayton. I mean, when people think of Esther Price, they’re going to think, Dayton, Ohio. This is where everything is still made,” Summers says.

“I have met with people before that have been eating our product for half a century and yet we’re still a local brand that has branched out, and we continue to branch out, but Dayton is where she was from and where we’re going to keep everything.”

Summers says expansion into the Louisville and Lexington markets is already underway, part of a careful growth strategy that protects the brand’s standards. But growth, he emphasizes, isn’t rushed. “It’s not a shotgun approach—it’s surgical.”

It is perhaps this surgical approach that underlines why Esther Price has proven a successful candy brand now for 10 decades. Those gold boxes have never changed and the ribbons around them are still handtied, not to mention the quality, which Summer says has never changed.

“I think that the feel-good product from the taste, the quality and the stories behind it,” Summers says. “I mean, I think it adds to the legend, really, because it hasn’t changed.”