Austin Atkinson, regional sales manager Western USA, holds a photo of his great-grand father, Basil Eric Atkinson, as he talks about the man who started the Atkinson Candy Company 93 years ago in Lufkin shown Friday, July 11, 2025.

Atkinson Candy Company CEO Eric Atkinson, left, along with his son, Austin Atkinson, regional sales manager Western USA, right, speaks about the company his grandfather started 93-years-ago in Lufkin shown Friday, July 11, 2025.

Juana Sarmiento prepares Chick-O-Stick candy at the Atkinson Candy Company in Lufkin Friday, July 11, 2025.

Austin Atkinson, regional sales manager Western USA, talks at the Atkinson Candy Company in Lufkin Friday, July 11, 2025. His great-grand father, Basil Eric Atkinson, started the Atkinson Candy Company 93 years ago. His father Eric Atkinson is the CEO.

LUFKIN ­­— Family-owned Atkinson Candy makes heritage sweets the old-fashioned way, with skilled confectioners mixing and folding peanut butter, toasted coconut and natural flavorings into pounds of boiling sugar in this Piney Woods town between Houston and Dallas.

The 93-year-old company makes Chick-o-Sticks, Long Boys, Mary Janes, Slo Pokes and a half-dozen brands your grandparents would recognize. The old-school flavors and vintage machinery belie the company's need to stay current with changing immigration policies, contemporary consumer preferences, Depression-era sugar subsidies and new global tariffs.

Trump administration policies both give and take from a small-town business.

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“We were well prepared by our forefathers for all eventualities,” Eric Atkinson, the third generation to run and own the company, told me. “This company started in the Great Depression, so we know about how to navigate that.”

The single-story, beige-brick factory sits inside an industrial zone with only a brightly-colored mural of hands pulling candy to suggest what’s inside. While the Atkinson confectionery is nothing like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, its proprietor shares the fictional character’s impish charm.

The production floor of the Safe Quality Food-certified factory smells of peanut butter, toasted coconut........

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