Seven days a week, Tricia Adams and her employees sit down at the confectionary machines that Helen Drew brought from New Hampshire to Dexter in 1927. Using the same recipes the original owner used, they fork-dip about 4,000 pieces of candy a day, one piece at a time.

“Dipping is an art,” said Adams, who learned the technique from two employees who retired last year after working at the Dexter shop for 33 years. “You can’t just sit down and start doing it.”

The candy company uses about 180 pounds a day of chocolate a day for dipping, said Adams, who has owned Drew’s for the past 15 years.

Now, Greater Des Moines chocolate lovers won’t have to travel as far to smell that great aroma and buy a pound or two. Drew’s, which closed its Merle Hay Mall store three years ago, last month opened a satellite shop at 513 Maple St. in West Des Moines’ Valley Junction district.

“Every customer that came in (to the new Valley Junction shop) said, ‘We’re so glad you’re back in town,'” Adams said. “That’s probably what keeps us going – the customers.”

For Christmas, its busiest holiday in terms of sales, Drew’s Chocolates will make and pack about 7,000 boxes of the milk- and dark-chocolate assortment, the company’s most popular seller.

Drew’s also specializes in chocolate-dipped homemade fudge, and dips just about anything else you can think of, from potato chips to apricots and strawberries. Another specialty is Drew Drops, a pecan and caramel turtle.

Adams says Drew’s is the only U.S. candy maker that still fork-dips every piece of chocolate, which provides both a personal touch and better quality.

“It gives a nice shine to the chocolates because you can always keep track of the temperatures,” she said. “With the bigger machines, sometimes you can’t do that.”

The company, which packages about 20,000 assortments a year, does about half of its business by mail order or through online orders on its Web site, www.drewschocolates.com.

The repeat orders are a natural result of the products’ quality, Adams said. “Everybody we send to, we just automatically get another customer, and then they’re sending [an additional order] to someone else.”

Every year, Drew’s receives many large orders for companies that give assortments as Christmas gifts to their clients. Larger orders require more lead time, of course, because an employee can typically pack 20 pounds of chocolates in an hour.

“A lot of people are under the misconception that they have to wait until the week before Christmas to get it fresh,” she said. Because the candy is made fresh daily, however, it will last up to three months after it’s sold. “They don’t have to wait until the day before they want it sent out.”

Before opening at Merle Hay, Drew’s operated a shop on Douglas Avenue in Urbandale for three years. Adams closed that shop after losing $15,000 in inventory when polyurethane fumes from a store being remodeled next door contaminated her chocolates. After three years at the mall, she got tired of the long hours and the expensive rent, she said.

One reason she chose Valley Junction was that the landlord didn’t require a long-term lease, she said.

Adams said she’s enjoying the close-knit family attitude of the shop owners in Valley Junction.

“They’re just super,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of customers say, ‘I didn’t know how to find you, and (another shop owner) sent me down.’ They’ve been super helpful.”