Sweet Science

Yesterday · Confectioner’s Row

For fifty years, Main Street was Confectioner’s Row

Through the first half of the 20th century, the run of Main Street between Kendall and Central squares was so thick with candy factories that locals simply called it Confectioner’s Row. At the 1946 peak, the Cambridge phone book listed 66 candy manufacturers.¹

1927 is the anchor point for Cambridge becoming candy central.

The James O. Welch Company opened its factory at 810 Main Street in 1927 and proceeded to create a slow-cooked caramel dynasty — Sugar Daddies (1926), Sugar Babies (1935), and Sugar Mamas (mid-1960s). Then, wanting to capitalize on Junior Miss, a popular play and radio show, Welch punned a brand name ‘Junior Mints’ (1949) and had a food chemist develop “a small, chocolate-covered fondant peppermint.”

A few blocks away, the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO) factory on Massachusetts Avenue opened in 1927 as what was then the largest candy factory in the world, turning out NECCO Wafers and Sweethearts conversation hearts by the ton. NECCO was founded in 1847 by Oliver Chase, a druggist who invented a machine to press medicinal lozenges — and sugar really did help the medicine go down once Chase began turning out sugar wafers with his invention.

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1 Daggett Chocolate Co. — 400 Main, Kendall · 1892–early 1960s 2 New England Confectionery Co. (NECCO) — Mass. Ave. · 1927–2004 in Cambridge. Production has since moved to Spangler Candy of Bryan, Ohio, which still makes NECCO Wafers — first pressed in 1847, one of the oldest candy brands in America. 3 James O. Welch — 810 Main · 1927–present

¹ The 66 entries are listings, not companies. Trace the owners and the count collapses to about 18 firms — Daggett and NECCO alone account for roughly three-quarters of the names, mostly house brands and co-located labels sharing one address and switchboard. Only sixteen were genuinely independent makers.

The turn · 1977

One small ordinance changed the recipe

The pivot from sweets to science came down to an unlikely piece of local lawmaking. In the mid-1970s, recombinant DNA — the new ability to splice genes — alarmed the public. Cambridge mayor Al Vellucci openly worried aloud about “the bug that ate Cambridge” crawling out of an MIT lab.

Rather than ban the work, the city did something stranger and smarter: it sat scientists and residents down together and, in 1977, passed the Cambridge Recombinant DNA Technology Ordinance — the first law of its kind anywhere in the country. By giving researchers clear, stable rules to work under, it delivered what no tax break could. It made Cambridge the safe, predictable place to build a biotech company.

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The biotech companies came soon after the ordinance. Biogen — co-founded in 1978 by MIT’s Phillip Sharp, a future Nobel laureate — opened on Binney Street in 1982 as Kendall’s first biotech. Genzyme, Pfizer, Novartis, Moderna and hundreds more followed, until the neighborhood earned its nickname: “the most innovative square mile on the planet.”

Today the neighborhood counts more than 250 biotech and pharma companies — over 120 inside the Kendall Square zip code alone — now joined by software, AI, and quantum-computing firms drawn to the same square mile. And it is still being built: on the 14-acre former Volpe federal site, MIT is raising Kendall Common, a new district of roughly 1,400 homes (some affordable), labs and offices anchored by Biogen’s next global headquarters, parks, and a community center, opening from 2028.

The living link · Still on Main Street

And yet the candy never fully left

The original Welch factory at 810 Main Street still operates today as Cambridge Brands, a division of Tootsie Roll — the last candy plant in the city, and the only place on Earth that makes Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, Sugar Daddy, and Charleston Chew. About 15 million Junior Mints come off the line here every day, behind painted-out windows, in a building most of its biotech neighbors have never set foot inside. In many respects it’s more secretive than its high-tech neighbors — no tours, no company name on front of the building.

But you know it’s there: when the wind is right near Central Square, you can still catch chocolate and mint on the air.

² Sources differ on the early tenancy. The building’s bronze plaque dates James O. Welch here from 1937, with Lydian Confectionery (1908) and H. D. Foss before him; History Cambridge dates the Welch factory at 810 Main from the company’s 1927 founding, while the Leventhal Map Center has Welch acquiring the property — formerly 814 Main Street — between 1930 and 1934.