One by one, the eggs are rolling off the production line, 250 a minute, at Zitner’s Fine Confections’ new chocolate factory in Hatfield, Montgomery County.
First come peanut butter eggs. Hair-netted and jacketed workers feed peanut butter cream from 50-pound tubs into a machine that forms it into eggs, coats them in chocolate, and sends them — like the old I Love Lucy bit — toward a whirring wrapping machine.
Next up will be Zitner’s dark chocolate specialties: Butter Cream, Coconut Cream, Double Coconut, and — the crown jewel — Butter Krak, a sweet amalgamation of everything.
For Evan Prochniak, Zitner’s CEO, this has been a long time coming.
The century-old Philadelphia candy company, whose cream-filled eggs have been Easter basket fixtures for generations, is back in production after missing the 2026 holiday season. Its products are expected to return to Philadelphia-area grocery shelves in December, possibly before Christmas.
While the factory is new, Prochniak insists the candy won’t be any different. Zitner’s is using the same recipes and ingredients that customers remember.
The comeback follows the closure of Zitner’s longtime North Philadelphia factory and the acquisition of Kargher Chocolate, a Hatfield manufacturer, by Prochniak, 55, and his business partner, Phil Priolo, 54.
» READ MORE: Inside the return of Zitner’s
The 25-mile move required hauling 10 truckloads of machinery up Route 309, installing new electrical service and compressed-air lines, and reconfiguring a 100-foot production line. It gives Zitner’s a modern home and room to expand.
Production began in September at about 220 eggs a minute. Prochniak has since increased the pace and hopes to reach 275 soon.
“We are really humming now,” he said last week. “There were a lot of little odds and ends that I tweaked, and we’re just cranking that candy out.”
Butter Cream production began last week, with Coconut Cream or Double Coconut next. Prochniak plans to make Butter Krak, the company’s top seller, from early December through New Year’s.
“There’ll be no Christmas for me at all,” he said. “It’ll be Easter.”
Chocolate season
Zitner’s starts its Easter production in the fall with peanut butter eggs, its only milk chocolate-coated variety. Making them first allows the company to thoroughly clean the equipment of peanuts afterward to prevent allergen cross-contact.
The peanut butter filling — made in-house from Virginia peanuts, salt, sugar, and other ingredients — is fed into machinery that forms, coats, cools, and wraps the eggs. They’re packed eight to a bag, 12 bags to a case.
The company has substantial orders from Acme and Weis Markets scheduled for shipment during the first two weeks of December, Prochniak said. ShopRite has placed large orders for early January.
Prochniak said he brought samples to an Acme representative last week. She told him the chain would put the candy on shelves as soon as it arrived.
Retailers have increased their orders even though Easter falls relatively early this year, on March 28, ordinarily a reason to order less because of the shorter selling season.
Prochniak said customers treat Zitner’s eggs differently from typical Easter candy.
“This is something people eat every week,” he said. “They go to the grocery store, put it in their shopping cart, eat it, and go back the next week for more.”
Some customers stock up before Easter and freeze it to last until the following year.
A factory in crisis
Zitner’s last manufactured candy at its factory near 17th and Clearfield Streets in summer 2024. Prochniak said the building, occupied since the 1960s, had deteriorated.
“If you go back and look at the Bizarre Foods episode we were on [in 2015], you can see the roof was already falling in back then,” he said.
A neighboring salvage operation also displaced the factory’s shipping and receiving area, forcing workers to load trucks on 17th Street.
Zitner’s outsourced production for Easter 2025 but couldn’t relocate in time for Easter 2026.
After an attempt to acquire another candy business in the Harrisburg area fell apart, Prochniak approached Douglas Kargher, who was looking to retire from his family-owned chocolate business.
Kargher wanted to sell outright, so Prochniak enlisted Priolo, his longtime friend and roommate back at Penn State, to be his business partner. They established Cocoa Ridge, a holding company, to acquire Kargher Chocolate’s assets. The deal closed in March.
Priolo, formerly an executive at Exelon, is president and CEO of the Kargher operation. His business card identifies him as Chief Chocolatier.
Zitner’s remains a separate company, and Kargher has its own private-label business making and selling chocolate chips and nonpareils.
The arrangement also gives Prochniak something he has long wanted: greater control over chocolate manufacturing. Zitner’s has traditionally purchased chocolate made to its specifications by outside manufacturers. In future, the partners plan to connect Kargher’s chocolate-making equipment to Zitner’s production lines.
A new beginning
Ingredient costs remain a challenge. Sugar, essential to the cream centers, has risen from about 57 cents a pound to nearly 78 cents, Prochniak said, and could reach 80 cents.
The production equipment represents years of experimentation.
Sixteen years ago, Prochniak was a real estate attorney eyeing up Zitner’s’ North Philadelphia property for redevelopment. When that plan fell through, he studied the then-88-year-old candy business and discovered it was turning away orders because it couldn’t make enough. He acquired Zitner’s with partners in 2010.
Starting around 2013, Prochniak worked with European equipment makers to automate production of Zitner’s soft centers, then added equipment for coating, cooling, and wrapping.
The line eventually stretched to 100 feet. In Philadelphia, it ran straight across the factory. In the Hatfield plant, where Zitner’s took over a Kargher storage area, workers cut an opening in a wall so the line could pass through, turn around, and continue in the opposite direction. It’s now about twice the size.
For all the modernization in production, Prochniak is adamant that the new equipment has not changed what goes into Zitner’s eggs; it just enables the factory to make more of them.
Butter Krak, the company’s top seller, dates to the 1930s. Annie Zitner, who founded the company in 1922 with her husband, Sam, in Kensington, taught her nephew Leon Sherman to make the combination of buttercream, shredded coconut, toasted coconut, and bittersweet chocolate. The eggs originally sold for a nickel.
Prochniak, who grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, remembers receiving Zitner’s candy at Easter, although his mother was strict about sweets.
His childhood favorite was Butter Cream. Today, it’s Butter Krak.
He has plans for more storage, possible expansion, and eventually reviving older Zitner’s products, including marshmallows and those big decorated buttercream and coconut cream eggs. He also wants to restore the small counter displays that once sold individually wrapped eggs at places such as Wawa.
But first, there are supermarket orders to fill.
The eggs keep coming
During a September visit, a worker kept the eggs lined up as they approached the wrapping machine.
“She’s also looking for flaws in the candy — pieces sticking together, cracks, incomplete chocolate coatings,” Prochniak said.
Rejects were pulled off the line and tossed into a bin. Each wrapped egg received a quality-control stamp.
“I can tell you the day that egg was made and trace it all the way back to the sugar that went into it,” Prochniak said. “Everything is tracked.”
Surely, it must be tempting to eat candy all day.
“Not good for your waistline,” Prochniak said. “But I’m tasting it all the time. I have to make sure the recipe is exactly what it’s supposed to be.”