Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Frango Mints - Still Not Made in Chicago




As many of you remember, Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren promised to bring the production of 1 lb. boxes of Frango back to Chicago for manufacturing. As proposed, Cupid Candies would make the 1 lb. boxes of regular mint Frangos ONLY! The remainder of the flavors would still be made by Gertrude Hawk Chocolates of Dunmore, PA. It seems most people in Chicago think Marshall Field's Famous Frangos are being made here. Wrong! It was just another ruse from Macy's to make us feel like we were getting something back for the loss of Field's.
Additionally, Macy's has removed the expiration dates from boxes and replaced them with a product manufacturer code. I'm guessing this has been done to hide the fact of how many have expired. I don't ever remember seeing an expired box of Frangos until Macy's took over.
I was in Kansas City, KS. in May of this year and the former Famous-Barr store was selling Frangos that had expired in February. This month I was in South Bend, IN. at the former L.S. Ayres store where they were still selling Frangos expired in September. Either way, it will be more difficult to decipher the new codes as opposed to an actual expiration date.

Organic Frangos proved to be a flop. Raspberry was discontinued then returned after about 3 months.
More to come! Remember Field's at Darrid.com

4 comments:

brvazquez said...

I know this is an old post but thought i would share: A Macy associate finally explained to me how to decipher the code on the box. Frango chocolate boxes are now marked with a 5 digit code, for an example: 12551

To decipher, eliminate the 1st digit so it would be 2551. 255 would be the day of the year, which is September 12th. The last digit would be the year, in this case 2011. Therefore my box of chocolates were made on Sept. 12th 2011 and so according to the associate they would be good for a year.

Anonymous said...

The latest box that I purchased in November, 2015, only has 4 digits (5225) So I have no idea when this was actually manufactured.

Lsfla said...

I purchase some this past december at macy's in DC. The code is 5 digits again: 11106. Do you think they're still good?

brvazquez said...

If you follow my comment above, your box of chocolates were made on April 19th, 2016 - so...it's over a year ago. If they look ashy, they're no longer good.