"In the end, the company has been in the business for 100 years, and customers really appreciate the fact that the fourth generation is taking over," say Julia Birnn Fields.

So how do you celebrate 100 hundred years of making chocolate and serving the retail confectionery community?

"What surprised me when I came in was that we needed to be even more customer focused. We have always been very brand and consumer focused and the biggest change we are making is further driving customer centricity throughout our business," Tracey Massey says.

“We learned a lesson,” Rosenberg says. “We were a bit too conservative, too hesitant to expand manufacturing and packaging capacity. So we made it our mandate last year to find a way to do it. And now, we’re back to our normal growth rates.”

Natasha’s Just Brittle started seven years ago, back in 2007, as a learning activity — literally.

A 3,000-sq.-ft. shop sells not only Thorntons’ confections, but also a limited selection of drinks, sandwiches, cakes and ice cream.

It was not a gathering that Jonathan Hart, newly hired chief executive for Thorntons, recalls looking forward to. He had just joined the company in January 2011.

In following her father’s footsteps, a civil engineer, Nicole Patel didn’t neglect art for the sake of science.

These days you can grab a chocolate bar with almost anything inside. In the past year companies have introduced flavors ranging from marshmallows to ginger to hemp seeds.

Vintage Confections sells hi-end lollipops for $40 in China — a sweet vignette that helps illustrate the global state of the industry for confections: borders are breaking down.