State's biggest candy man has a job he can stick with.

• Position: Beacon Sweets Pres. Andy Cohen

Beacon Sweets President Andy Cohen is Mooresville's Willie Wonka. But running a candy company isn't all fun and games, what with meeting payroll, paying taxes, overseeing quality control ...

Yeah, right. Employees can help themselves to jars of candy around the factory. How stressful can life be when your top-selling product is Rolicks, a gummy wristwatch that "takes a licking and keeps on sticking"? Eating them is "like gulping down a snake," Cohen says.

OK, so it's not tire recapping. Cohen won't disclose sales for Beacon, the largest candy maker in the state, but they're up "dramatically, a couple of hundred percent" since it moved to Mooresville in 1987. Rolicks grossed $1 million in the three months after its October introduction.

Cohen, 41, was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and got a bachelor's in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town in 1979. He moved to Durban to join Beacon Sweets & Chocolates, South Africa's biggest candy company, after marrying the boss's daughter. (Her grandfather started it in 1931.)

Beacon had bought a U.S. candy company in the late '70s, and Cohen moved to Newark to manage its plant. He got an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1985, then became president. "I like to think I was the right guy in the right place at the right time. As opposed to nepotism."

With apartheid sanctions in full swing, Beacon spun off the U.S. subsidiary in 1987. (Cohen's in-laws still own it, and he has a small share.) He moved it from Newark because it had no room to expand.

Beacon gets most of its revenue from...