By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As a young boy watching the 1971 film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I dreamed that someday I’d get my own tour of a candy factory. I ever imagined, however, that my guide would be a petite and dynamic Trappist nun from Iowa.
That’s exactly what happened in November 2024 when my friend Bill White and I visited the monastery near Dubuque where both that kind Trappist sister and the candy factory reside. Both proved to be better than any adventure with Mr. Wonka.
Bill and I were in Iowa to celebrate the “retirement” from monastery leadership of another friend, Father Brendan Freeman of New Melleray Abbey. We’d met Brendan when he lived in Utah from 2013 to 2017, helping the aging monks at the Huntsville monastery close down their operations.
(I grew up at the old Northern Utah abbey, a tale I tell in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings.)
During our most-recent Iowa visit, Father Brendan took us to see the delightful Trappist women who live at the nearby Abbey of Our Lady of the Mississippi. The Trappist sisters, sometimes called Trappistines, first arrived on the rural Iowa prairie in October 1964.
Their motherhouse—Mount Saint Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts —was bursting at the seams. The New England monastery sent thirteen sisters west to start a new abbey.
They settled on the Stampfer Family’s old Hickory Hill estate, perched on a knoll overlooking the Mississippi River. For many years, the Stampfers had operated a store known as the “Macy’s of Dubuque.”
The Trappistines renovated the large Stampfer house into a temporary monastic home. They adapted existing smaller cottages and outbuildings to meet the abbey’s other needs.
Today, the monastery’s 630 acres include managed woodlands and an organic farm. Following their Trappist motto of ora et labora—Latin for prayer and work—the founding Iowa sisters also started the hard work of building a new chapel and establishing a business to support the abbey.
The church took shape without incident. Not so much for the business.
The sisters first tried to make and sell cookies, but they encountered many operational difficulties. Mississippi founder Sister Gail Fitzpatrick once explained to a news reporter that the cookies burned and broke. Their initial business plan crumbled—literally and figuratively.
As a result, the sisters turned to candy-making, a craft their motherhouse had perfected a decade earlier. Abbey lore says a Greek candy maker gifted some of his secret recipes to the Massachusetts nuns. They happily shared this confidential know-how with their Iowa counterparts in 1965 and six decades later, the delicious work of making candy goes on at both monastic houses.
In Wrentham, the sisters make delicious treats like Santa Pops, Trappistine Trio, Butter Nut Munch, Chocolate Squares, Chocolate Almond Squares, Chocolate Hearts, Chocolate Fudge, Chocolate Walnut Fudge, Almond Brittle, and Maple Walnut Penuche.
The good sisters from Iowa annually make and sell over 32 tons of Trappistine Creamy caramels.
Their initial product, a “Classic Vanilla,” remains the all-time bestseller and customer favorite.
The Trappistines also produce a popular “Creamy Chocolate” (vanilla caramel with chocolate liquor). And they make and sell dark/milk chocolate covered caramels, sea salt caramels, hazelnut meltaways, Irish mints, Swiss mints, truffles, caramel sauce, chocolate sauce, and maple syrup.
The Iowa sisters say that their products are made with pure butter, cream, and loving care. That love comes from employees and volunteers, but also from Trappistines ranging in age from 25 to 84 who pray while they work.
When Bill White and I were in Iowa recently, Father Brendan asked Sister Kathleen O’Neill, the general manager of the Mississippi Abbey candy factory, to give us a tour. Sister Kathleen is a true renaissance woman.
In addition to making candy, she plays the organ and the harp, and directs the novices at both Mississippi Abbey and at New Melleray Abbey. The New Jersey native has held numerous other leadership roles during her 45 years of monastic life.
Sister Kathleen took us through the factory where the nuns perform their sweet labors. The nondescript building actually is a state-of-the art facility dedicated twenty years ago. Father Brendan and the Iowa monks helped build it.
The 12,000 square foot candy house is heated and cooled geothermally, ensuring both environmental sustainability and conditions vital to good candy production. The Trappistines recently added several cold storage rooms to help them better manage and control their inventory.
They’ve also added a prayer room, allowing them to take a break in the middle of the work day for their primary job…praying for all of us.
The Today show featured the operation in 2017. We got a close look too, one that Sister Kathleen also has put in writing in the abbey’s 50th anniversary book called A Life of Hope.
On our tour, Sister Kathleen first showed us the ingredient room, which holds all the delicious building blocks of a piece of caramel—sugar, butter, cream, and corn syrup. The sisters have on site the largest tank of corn syrup I’ve ever seen.
She then explained how the caramels are first cooked in large copper kettles, around 90 pounds per batch. As soon as each batch is cooked, the hot caramel (temperature about 242°F) is poured and spread on a large marble or steel table where it cools overnight.
The next day, the cooked caramel is cut into slabs and each slab is run through a machine which cuts it into strips. The strips of caramel are put through a large and complex machine which cuts them into individual caramels and (the tricky part) wraps them in cellophane.
The century-old machine, lovingly dubbed “Old Faithful,” sometimes breaks down. Sister Kathleen said they are exploring options for a better system in part because the best repairperson and operator for that machine—the monastery’s current leader Sister Rebecca Stramoski—has many other responsibilities too.
The wrapped caramels are inspected for quality control and then put into finished gift boxes for storage and/or delivery. Some caramels, although still high-quality, are not good enough for the Trappistines.
The sisters set them aside to be remelted into another batch and some are used as samples. Luckily, on the day of our tour, Bill and I got to eat several of these “rejects,” which we happily digested.
Other caramels are coated in chocolate. These caramel squares are fed onto a belt, pass under a flow of chocolate, and then go into a cooling tunnel. Their journey through the cooling tunnel lasts about seven minutes.
Sister Kathleen told us some of these caramels have a small chocolate “tail” right after coating. Thus, the sisters added a small strip of metal on the conveyor belt that removes the tail. She grinned mischievously when she told us they call it the “detailer.”
Just before the newly coated caramels enter the cooling tunnel, a diagonal “squiggle” is put on each candy by hand to indicate that what’s inside is a caramel. When the cooled candy comes out of the tunnel, it is put into gift boxes. The completed gift boxes are shrink wrapped, and then packed into cartons, which are stacked on pallets for storage or shipping.
After our wonderful tour, as we walked to our car with Sister Kathleen just before we left Mississippi Abbey, we ran into Sister Myra Hill walking one of the abbey’s dogs. We also saw Sister Rebecca and Sister Gail, two pillars of the abbey I’d met on a previous visit, along with new young Trappistines like Sister Mary and Sister Annie.
Seeing these gentle and lovely women again reminded me how the abbey’s “magic” surpasses that found at any Willie Wonka facility. Indeed, I can easily imagine Sister Kathleen—whom I liked immediately—saying some of the wonderful things attributed to Wonka by his writer/creator Roald Dahl.
She might readily describe the Trappistine candy factory we visited this way: “Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.”
And most critically, given the beauty of the Mississippi Abbey and of the ultimate spiritual destination beyond it to which she and the other Trappist sisters aspire, I can also imagine Sister Kathleen saying, “If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.”
(Photo: Sister Kathleen and Mike O’Brien in front of the Mississippi Abbey candy factory.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
