It was once ‘Kansas City’s candy bar.’ 120 years later, its future is uncertain
Russ Sifers doesn’t come into work much anymore. At 77, and supposedly retired, he mostly stays home, watches the numbers from a distance and wonders if the company his great-grandfather started in 1903 has finally run out of road.
“Valomilk is Kansas City’s candy bar,” Sifers said this week from behind a mahogany desk in his time capsule of an office in Merriam. “But there’s been a changing of the guard in the candy business. And we don’t have a guard.”
Sifers’s company makes exactly one product: the Valomilk, a simple milk-chocolate cup filled with marshmallow that melts quickly and tends to ooze out when you bite into it. Candy connoisseurs know it, and Midwesterners of a certain age know it.
But Valomilk long ago stopped trying to compete for shelf space with big candy conglomerates like Hershey, Mars and Nestle. You won’t find it in most grocery stores or convenience stores. Even here, in Valomilk’s hometown, it’s rare to spot one in the wild.
Instead, Sifers has spent the last few decades leaning into the company’s quirks — the hand-stirred batches, the war-era machinery, the refusal to use preservatives or stabilizers — and built a business on nostalgia and purity. That approach earned the candy a devoted following. But it is a small following. And it has made the modern retail world harder to navigate.
It has all built up to a precarious moment for Valomilk, one that Sifers has long mused about but never seriously considered: He is ready to sell the company.
But to whom? Who could continue making the product to Sifers’ exacting standards? Who would take the helm while staying true to what makes Valomilk Valomilk?
“I’d like to find a proper steward,” Sifers said. “Somebody who can take care of our simple little candy bar — bring it back, improve it, whatever.”
He gestured at the memorabilia surrounding him: midcentury Valomilk advertisements, a U.S. map with push pins representing the locations of former distributors, newspaper clippings, family photos. The legacy of a company founded the same year as Harley Davidson and Ford Motor Co.
“This is my heritage, you see?”
The family business
Bald on top, with curly white hair that forms an unruly cloud around his head, Sifers is a voluble man. He delights in telling the Valomilk story. He has told it many times, to many reporters, since he took the reins in the 1980s.
His great-grandfather Samuel Mitchell Sifers started selling hard candy and chocolates in Iola, Kansas, in 1903. His son, Harry Iba Sifers, moved the operation to downtown Kansas City — at 20th and Main streets, in a building that has since been torn down — in 1916. Sometime in the 1930s, the story goes, an employee accidentally made a runny batch of penny marshmallows. Rather than discarding it, Russ’ grandfather, Harry Sifers, deposited the soft marshmallow into chocolate cups.
Thus was born the Valomilk: “V” for vanilla, “alo” for marshmallow, “milk” for the milk-chocolate cups.
The Sifers Candy Company made several confection products, but from then on Valomilk was always the bestseller. By the time it was sold to Hoffman, the California-based maker of a similar product called Cup-O-Gold, in 1970, the company was one of the largest candymakers in the Midwest.
Russ worked for the company during the Hoffman era; he was by then a certified candy technologist. But he felt the new West Coast owners didn’t care about the Midwestern jewel they’d bought. In 1981, Hoffman closed the Sifers factory. Valomilks disappeared.
Five years later, Hoffman was looking to sell the factory building downtown. Sifers struck an agreement that allowed him to acquire his great-grandfather’s original copper kettles, gas-fired cookers, mixers, and other candy-making equipment along with the rights to the Valomilk name. He pieced together the old recipe and in 1987 resumed production of Valomilks at a small factory in Merriam.
“I wanted to make Valomilks the way my grandfather did, before (Hoffman) came along,” Sifers said. “I told my dad I was thinking about resurrecting the company. He died before it happened. He never got to see it.
“But he always said to me — he commanded me — if you bring Valomilks back, make them the best you know how, and don’t worry about the cost. And that’s what we’ve done.”
The chocolate factory
Down on the factory floor, Sifers’ son-in-law, Dave Swiercinsky, 60, oversees the candymaking process. Many of the workers, including his wife, are Laotian. “We like to keep a family feel here,” Dave said.
The machines — hulking, finicky steel beasts — date to the early 1940s. The process is slow, sweaty and obsessively manual. First they make the marshmallow. They add a bowl of meringue made from reconstituted pan-dried egg whites into a heated mixture of corn syrup, sugar, water and salt. But not too hot.
“If it gets too hot,” Dave said, “you get scrambled eggs.”
The marshmallow is left overnight in an insulated box, kept just under 100 degrees. The next morning, they pour an industrial-sized bowl of marshmallow into the depositor. On the line, trays pass beneath a series of heads — one lays down chocolate, another blasts it with air to form the cup, then the marshmallow goes in. A cooling tunnel firms things up. A second chocolate layer seals the top.
That’s it. No preservatives. No artificial coatings. The chocolate is a custom blend of milk and dark that gives it a sharper flavor. Distilled water only — no tap. The vanilla comes from Madagascar. The pan-dried egg whites come from a company in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Valomilk is their only U.S. customer; most of their product is shipped to European confectioners.
That level of craftsmanship has always been the point — and the problem.
Valomilks are delicate, messy, and melt if you look at them wrong. They’re meant to be eaten fresh. In the modern candy business, where long shelf lives and heat-resistant coatings are the norm, that makes distribution tricky. “We make it fresh,” Dave said. “But what happens after it leaves us? That’s the problem.”
For years, Russ and Dave relied on regional distributors who understood their product. That old network has frayed. Cracker Barrel, once a major account, dropped them last summer after complaints about melted or damaged stock. The chain’s longtime CEO had retired, and a new one came in with different priorities.
“We were in something like 180 Cracker Barrels,” Russ said. “Then we weren’t.”
The situation is similar with local groceries. Russ recalls a time when a single sales rep could walk the aisles of Price Chopper or Hen House, check the stock, and keep the candy moving. Today, big companies buy their way into stores, locking down prime placement through advertising and incentive fees.
“It was a handshake business,” Russ said. “Now it’s all computers. You have to have sales volume to justify that shelf space — and we don’t have that. And a lot of the old distributors have been consolidated into mega-distributors, and they don’t even know who I am anymore.”
As a result, it’s gotten harder and harder to find a Valomilk. Specialty candy shops around the country carry Valomilks, and Dave drops boxes off at small businesses nearby (Merriam Hardware, The Peddler’s Daughter). But mass-market retailers are a different story.
Hershey got them bumped them out of QuikTrip, Russ said, and Hy-Vee wants too much for shelf space. They send Valomilks to Associated Wholesale Grocers, a retail-owned cooperative that wholesales to more than 3,500 independent supermarkets in the U.S.
“But I think we’re only in about 100 of those stores at this point,” Russ said. “Look for us on the bottom shelf next to the Cherry Mash.”
Sweet relief
Over the years, Russ has thought about a few potential buyers. Pearson Candy Company, the St. Paul-based maker of Salted Nut Rolls, tried for years to buy Valomilk, Russ said.
“But things were going good here, and I wasn’t ready. And then a few years ago they got bought by Annabelle out of California.”
He also heard from Tom and Scott Ward, sons of candy magnate Lou Ward, who helped build Russell Stover into a national brand. “They always asked if I wanted to sell out to them,” Sifers said. Then they sold their company in 2014 — for $1.6 billion.
Another is Tootsie Roll.
“It’s a company I’ve admired for many years,” he said. “It’s publicly traded, but the Gordon family has held onto control of the majority of the shares. It’s allowed them to expand and modernize while maintaining quality. To find a fairy godmother like that would be great. Because people love Valomilks. But we just don’t have the capacity or the know-how anymore to get them to our fans like we used to.”
Russ was born in 1948 at the Willows Maternity Sanitarium, a long-demolished building at 2929 Main St. in Kansas City. Today, there’s a plaque marking the site. It was there, in that mostly forgotten place, that he was adopted into the Sifers candy family.
He never knew his biological parents. Then a few years ago he learned that the state of Missouri had opened its long-closed adoption records. For $15, he discovered his given name: Dwight Potter. Last November, he met two siblings he never knew he had, both raised in California.
“We talked about how they grew up, and how I grew up,” Russ said. “I was lucky. By being adopted, I was very fortunate. But it makes me think, could I give up Valomilk? Could I give it away, like my birth mother gave me away? I’ll cry — I guarantee you that. But I think once I do, I’ll be happy. And then I’ll be ready to leave this world.”
This story was originally published June 27, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
