“But our answer was, pretty offices don’t sell candy,” Gaffney says.

After Necco acquired the Clark Candy Company, makers of the Clark Bar, in 1999, and another smaller company, the old factory on Mass. Ave.—even with an extra facility on Cambridge Street and a warehouse in Woburn–wasn’t large enough.

When a space opened up in Revere, Necco decided to move.

“Factories just don’t locate in downtown areas anymore,” says Laurie Cimbalary, Necco’s marketing manager. “We would have liked to stay, but there just wasn’t enough room.”

The new plant has room for more Necco wafers, more conversation hearts, more chocolate bars and more modern operations.

And of the old factory, Marshall says, “It’s going to be better than ever. They’re pumping a lot of money into that place, and its being preserved and upgraded. I think it’s going to have a new life.”

A New Approach

Novartis recently moved its research headquarters to Cambridge—and will split its facilities between Necco and “The 100 Building,” at MIT-owned 100 Technology Place.

Novartis wants to make its facilities in Cambridge the model for a new kind of drug research—they want to work closely with professors from Harvard and MIT and use cutting-edge research on the human genome to tailor their cures to specific diseases.

The typical model for developing drugs has followed something of a guess-and-check approach, Novartis executives say.

Companies would create a chemical compound and then test it out on a simulation of a disease to see what would work.

Diseases were seldom thoroughly understood, they say.

Diabetes, for instance, can take on many forms, with a range of symptoms—some of which can be prevented by certain drugs.

The payoff is big if the pharmaceutical companies find a hit.

But the resulting products don’t always last, because they can’t provide complete or effective solutions.