There's more than one type of Idaho spud, you know (or maybe you don't...)

The Idaho Spud candy bar is an acquired taste. Around here, I'm about the only one who seems to like them and, I have to admit, I tend to go hot and cold on the strangely textured and uniquely flavored candy. It's fun, though, to watch people's reactions to them on a store shelf. Some people (the uninitiated) look puzzled, others cringe, and others light up. This is not your generic candy, thank you. People form opinions on it.

Luckily for the small independent candy company that makes them, the oddness, or perhaps I should say the uniqueness, appeals to consumers to the tune of about 3 million bars of the chocolate-covered, potato-shaped candy a year, according to Candy bar inspired by Idaho spuds a seller, an article written by Anne Wallace Allen for the Associated Press, and picked up at HappyNews.com.

For recipes using the Idaho Spud bar, go here.

For Idaho Candy Company history, go here. From that section, here's a nice tribute to an employee:

Idaho Candy Company's most famous employee is most definitely Violet Brewer. Vi began work at Idaho Candy in 1913 when her mother took ill and Vi had to work to help support the family. Vi was only 13 years old at the time and her first job was stoking the furnace. Later on she became the premier hand chocolate dipper for the company. Vi dipped and rolled chocolates for 50 years and later went to the weighing department where she worked for another 30 years. Vi finally retired in 1995, 82 years after she started with the company.

To mail order directly from the company, go here. In addition to the Idaho Spud, there's the Old Faithful Bar, the Cherry Cocktail Bar, and Owyhee Butter Toffee. (Owyhee, by the way, is a variant form of Hawaii, and the pronunciation is similar, sans the starting "h". If you go to the company history page, there's an explanation.)

And, no, I don't have any connection to the company. I just love it that a small, independent candy manufacturer is still making candy more than a hundred years after its founding, using some of the same equipment earlier employees used at the same factory in the early 1900s. Call it a love of tradition, if you like.