At 534 South 100 West in Provo there is a two-story brick building with an arched door bay and a name on it that most people driving past have never thought about.
It is one of the oldest industrial buildings in the city, it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the business it was built for in 1900 is still selling the candy bar it was famous for in the 1890s, in a box that has barely changed.
The story behind it involves a fatal industrial accident, a widow with four children who kept the business alive, three brothers who put their city's name on a wrapper, a bank foreclosure, and a war that ran the company out of sugar. It is the best business story Provo has, and almost nobody in the city knows it.
An English candy maker comes to Provo
William Daw Startup learned confectionery from his father in England. He married Hagar Hick in Salt Lake City in November 1869, and the couple moved to Provo in 1874.
By 1875 they were making candy in a small operation next to their home on Center Street — on ground now occupied by later development in the middle of downtown. It was a family business at the smallest possible scale: a shop and a workroom, run by two people.
It lasted three years.
The cooling slab
In January 1878, William was struck by one of the heavy stone slabs used to cool candy. Accounts describe a burst blood vessel; he died ten days later. He was in his thirties.
This is the hinge of the whole story and it is worth pausing on. A specialist trade, a business three years old, and the only person who knew how to run it was dead — leaving Hagar with four small children, the youngest of them about a year old.
She kept making candy. Not as a memorial and not as a hobby, but because it was the household's income and because she knew how. She continued on a small scale for years, and she taught the trade to her sons.
That decision is the reason there is anything else to write about.
The sons take over
The boys grew up apprenticing at the Provo Inquirer, where they learned printing — a detail that looks incidental and turns out to be central.
By 1892 the business Hagar had held together was substantial enough to be counted among the largest wholesale manufacturing operations in Utah. In the mid-1890s the sons formally organized the Startup Candy Company, with George as president, Harry Walter as vice president and William J. as treasurer.
They divided the work the way family businesses do when it goes well: Walter ran production, George ran the business, William ran a sales force that pushed the product out across the western states.
Their first purpose-built factory went up at 69 South 300 West.
The Opera Bar
Then, in the mid-1890s, they made the thing they are remembered for.
The Opera Bar was a chocolate bar with three layers of cream filling — chocolate, vanilla and strawberry — and it sold for ten cents. The family's claim, repeated in local histories and heritage listings for over a century, is that it was the first filled candy bar made in America.
Sources disagree on the year, giving 1895 or 1896, which is normal for a nineteenth-century product launch that nobody documented at the time. They disagree more consequentially on the claim itself: some drop the qualifier and say simply "the first candy bar in America," which is a much stronger statement.
We think the qualified version is the defensible one. Confectionery firsts are notoriously contested, records from the period are thin, and the company's own account has always specified the filling. The claim as the family makes it is well documented locally and has been cited in popular reference works. The unqualified version circulates mainly on aggregator pages.
The wrapper carried a line worth remembering: "Provo, Utah, The Candy City."
Why the printing apprenticeship mattered
Here is where those years at the Inquirer pay off.
The Startups built their own box plant. In an era when most confectioners bought packaging from someone else, they printed and made their own — which meant they controlled cost, design and turnaround on the part of the product the customer sees first.
They were among the few companies west of the Mississippi producing their own boxes for hand-dipped chocolates. And the packaging discipline shows in the strangest surviving detail of the whole story: the Opera Bar box still opens at the ends, and still carries the name across an illustration, more than a century later.
Alongside the Opera Bar came Magnolias — tiny perfumed candies with liquid centers, sometimes described as a forerunner of the breath mint — and an extensive chewing gum line running from ordinary flavors to genuinely peculiar ones, including a rose-flavored gum.
The peak, and the labor practices nobody expects
By 1900 the brothers had outgrown the first factory and built the complex that still stands on 100 West, adding offices and the printing and box plant.
The company's high-water mark came in the 1920s: around 175 employees, fifteen salesmen, distribution across the western states and into a handful of foreign markets, and annual sales of roughly half a million dollars.
The part of this that deserves more attention than it gets is how they ran it. In a period when industrial labor practices in America were frequently brutal, Startup provided life insurance and profit-sharing bonuses — described as the first factory in Utah to do the latter. And in 1914, George Startup lobbied the Utah Legislature for a minimum-wage bill covering female workers.
That is not a detail you expect to find attached to a candy company in a small western city, and it sits oddly with the modern habit of treating historical business as uniformly rapacious.
The Depression takes the factory
The 1930s ended the run.
The company struggled, and the bank took possession of the factory. Walter bought out his brothers and managed to buy back part of the complex — the north half and the box plant — where he kept making candy.
Then the Second World War produced a problem no amount of resourcefulness could solve: sugar became nearly impossible to obtain. Most of the product line was discontinued.
After the war Harry Startup revived the business, and his son Jon succeeded him. Opera Bars and Magnolias came back, sold in reproductions of the original boxes, alongside a wide range of suckers.
The building, and what it is now
The factory at 534 South 100 West was added to the National Register of Historic Places in October 1983 and designated a Provo City historic landmark in March 1996.
Architecturally it is a two-story late Victorian building sitting between warehouse and light commercial in style, with a Roman arched door bay and decorative brickwork — the kind of turn-of-the-century industrial building that most American cities demolished in the 1960s and 70s.
The family sold it in the present century. It now functions as an event and reception venue with offices leased to other businesses, which is a common and reasonably happy fate for a building of this type. The candy company continues under the family name, selling the Opera Bar and its other historic products.
It is also plaque number 38 in Provo's series of markers commemorating events from the city's history, which is the closest the city comes to an official statement that this matters.
Why Utah made so much candy
The Candy City line was marketing, but the underlying industry was real.
Utah's dry climate genuinely suits confectionery. Humidity is the enemy of hard candy, chocolate tempering and sugar work generally, and a dry mountain valley is a better place to make sweets than a coastal city. The state built a confectionery sector out of proportion to its population, and it retains one.
Startup was early to that and helped establish it. The company was Utah's third-largest wholesale manufacturer by 1892 — in any category, not just candy — which tells you something about both the business and the size of Utah's manufacturing base at the time.
A note on the sources, because they disagree
This story is unusually well told locally and unusually poorly documented centrally, and anyone who goes looking will hit the same contradictions we did.
The founding date moves. Sources give 1874 and 1875 for the arrival and the start of candy making, and both are probably right about different things — one the move, one the business.
The Opera Bar year moves. 1895 and 1896 both appear, including in sources that otherwise agree on everything.
The first factory address moves. 69 South 300 West appears in the company's own account; other sources describe the 100 West complex as dating from 1898 rather than 1900.
The number of brothers involved varies depending on whether a source counts William J., who appears in some tellings and not others.
None of these change the shape of the story, and we have not tried to resolve them by picking whichever number looked tidiest. Where sources disagree we have said so. The dates that are firm — the National Register listing in October 1983, the city landmark designation in March 1996 — are the ones with paperwork behind them, which is exactly the pattern you would expect.
The claim most worth flagging is the one this page's own working title carried at the outset: that Startup was the oldest candy factory west of the Mississippi. We could not find support for it in any source that documents the business. What the sources actually say is that it is the oldest candy company in Utah, that it is among the oldest in the country, and that it was one of the few firms west of the Mississippi making its own boxes. Somewhere along the way those got compressed into a bigger claim. We are not repeating it.
The gum, which deserves its own paragraph
Buried in the company's own history is a product line that reads like a fever dream.
Startup was among Utah's early major chewing gum producers, and the flavor list ran well past the obvious. Grape, orange, cherry, licorice, spearmint, extra-mint, lime and something called fruity-fruit occupied the ordinary end.
The other end held Violet, Oriental Bouquet, and a rose-flavored gum sold as Buy-Roz.
Floral confectionery was genuinely fashionable in the period — the Magnolias were perfumed too — and a company that had already built its own printing operation was clearly not short of people willing to try things. It is a useful reminder that the past was not a more cautious place than the present. It was frequently stranger.
What Provo looked like while this was happening
Context, because a candy factory employing 175 people means something different in a small city than in a large one.
Provo in the 1890s was a town of a few thousand people, an agricultural and increasingly industrial center anchored by a railroad connection and by the school that would become BYU. It had a woolen mill, a foundry, and the beginnings of the ironworking industry that would later reshape the valley entirely.
A confectionery operation shipping to multiple states and employing well over a hundred people was, in that context, one of the larger private employers in the city. The Candy City line on the wrapper was promotional, but it was not absurd.
The valley's economic center of gravity moved decisively in the 1940s with the arrival of heavy industry, and moved again toward technology at the end of the century — a sequence our Utah City explainer traces through the steel years and out the other side. Startup predates all of it.
How to see it for yourself
There is no visitor center and no tour, so the realistic version of a visit is short and worth doing anyway.
The building. 534 South 100 West. Look at the brickwork and the arched door bay, and note the scale — this is a purpose-built industrial complex from 1900 sitting in what is now an ordinary Provo block. Access to the interior depends entirely on whether an event is on, since the space operates as a reception venue rather than a museum.
The plaque. Number 38 in the city's historical marker series, part of a self-guided sequence that is one of the better free afternoons in Provo.
The candy. The Opera Bar is still sold, still in the end-opening box. Buying one is the cheapest possible way to hold a piece of a 130-year-old business, and the packaging is genuinely more interesting than the confection.
The neighborhood. The building sits south of the downtown core, in the part of Provo where the city's industrial past is still legible in the building stock if you know to look for it.
What the story is actually about
It would be easy to write this as a heritage piece about an old candy bar. The more interesting reading is about who kept it going.
The founder died three years in. The business survived because his widow kept working. It scaled because her sons brought in a skill — printing — that had nothing to do with candy. It survived the Depression because one brother bought back a fragment. It survived the war on nothing. It came back because the next generation chose to.
Five generations of decisions, any one of which could have ended it, and the visible result is a small cardboard box that still opens at the ends.
Our oldest businesses in Provo guide covers the others that made it this far, and our Provo history page places the candy years in the wider story of a city that has reinvented its economy several times over. For the twentieth-century sequel — a different Provo company, a different global product, a different ending — the WordPerfect and Novell history is the one to read next.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Startup Candy Company?
Did Startup Candy really make the first candy bar in America?
Is Startup Candy the oldest candy company in Utah?
Can you visit the Startup Candy Factory in Provo?
What was in an Opera Bar?
What happened to the Startup Candy Company?
Why was Provo called the Candy City?
Was Startup Candy connected to Coca-Cola?