By Marie Elium
The burning candles in the small testing room cast a flickering, fragrant, calming glow. Beyond its door, machines and conveyors clank and spin in the sprawling busyness of the Root Candles factory. Making candles is noisy; testing them is a quieter, unrushed affair.
Samples burn for hours on shelves marked with dates, batch numbers and other vital details so workers can check for flaws: sputtering flames, uneven burning, and other vexing candle issues. There’s no better way to test a candle than to burn it.
Long History
The testing room comes toward the end of Brad Root’s tour of his family’s Medina factory. The fifth generation of his family to oversee the company, Root points out the warren of molds, soaring units, drums, jar-fillers, wick braiders and other devices that turn beeswax into candles. Areas of the floor have a skim of wax, requiring careful footing. The factory makes and ships 20 million candles a year from this building north of Medina’s Public Square. Wax on the floor isn’t too surprising; more surprising is that wax isn’t everywhere.
The factory is a familiar place for Root, today the president of the company founded in 1869 by his great-great-grandfather, Amos Ives Root. Brad Root has worked there from the time he was a teenager when his late father, John Root, ran the company. He eventually took over as president and chairman of the board; it’s the only place he’s ever worked. His sons, Kyle and Andrew, want to eventually join the company but are pursuing work outside it for now. His daughter Emilie and a cousin both work for the company, representing the family’s sixth generation.
While Root’s career has focused on one industry, the same wasn’t true for his great-great-grandfather Amos, a jeweler turned bee enthusiast whose innovations influenced beekeepers throughout the world. He was curious about not only the world in his backyard and the bees that inhabited it, but also, notably, people and events far from home.
Amos improved upon existing honey extraction techniques that preserved hives and their bees. The process, and subsequent standardization of beekeeping equipment, allowed for the mass production of honey and its byproduct, beeswax, Root says.
Medina, because of A.I. Root’s innovations, became the country’s center of beekeeping. He wrote “The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture,” the essential guide for beekeepers that has been updated over the decades since it first came out in 1879. It was published six years after he began his magazine,“Gleanings in Bee Culture.” Today called “Bee Culture Magazine,” it’s still published by the Root company.
Beekeeping was far from A.I. Root’s only interest. Curious about and supportive of education for blind and deaf children, he exchanged letters with Helen Keller and they became lifelong friends, according to company history.
A.I. Root wrote articles for “Scientific American” magazine on topics he found interesting, among them the work of two brothers in Dayton who were experimenting with a machine that flew.
A.I. Root made the long drive to Dayton to see it for himself. Orville and Wilbur Wright permitted him to watch their experimental flights at nearby Huffman Prairie, where they worked after their test flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He published his story in the January 1905 issue of “Gleanings in Bee Culture,” the first and only eyewitness account of the Wright Brothers’s inaugural flight in which they took off and landed after making a complete circle. A copy of the account is in the Smithsonian Institution.
Changes
The Root family has piloted and expanded the company from its earliest days of beekeeping innovation, beeswax production, and beekeeping supplies and honey sales. Today, after nearly 155 years, there’s still a Root family member at the top—Brad Root—but the company focuses solely on candlemaking and retail sales throughout the United States.
CEO Miguel de Gracia, hired in 2017, oversees day-to-day operations which include a solid piece of the liturgical and church candle market, about 65 percent of the company’s business.
That brings us back to the candle test room. Root explains that, with all of the Root candle components made either at the Medina factory or sourced from places in the United States, the company takes its “American Made” moniker seriously. Beeswax comes from American producers like Sue Bee honey, and candle jars from Toledo’s Libbey glass, to name two.
Root says that running a family-owned company of American-made candles is like a game of Whack-A-Mole, with pressure from supply chain snags, cheap imports, and other marketplace vagaries. That’s why the company makes much of its supplies, braiding and waxing thousands of miles of wick, for example.
The company has more than 2,000 retailers, all in the United States, and a 22,000-square-foot retail store next to its factory. While Root Candles has deep and impressive connections with historic events and the people behind them, it keeps pace with the interests and tastes of today’s candle buyers. De Gracia says the company uses fragrance consultants to guide new introductions of candles each year—Japanese Cedarwood, French Vanilla and Lavender Vanilla remain the most popular. Social media platforms and home design influencers steer sales and trends like wooden wick candles that mimic small, crackling fires.
With a sixth generation on deck, the company is on track to remain a family-owned candle-making company, in a city where the high school teams are the Battling Bees and a middle school is named after founder A.I. Root.
Days before the season’s first snowfall, bees plucked the last bits of pollen from late-blooming flowers outside the company’s headquarters. Their activity was delightfully unexpected for the season, but maybe it shouldn’t have been. What better landscape for bees than a place that turns their wax into candles?
