In 1908, Salvatore Ferrara opened a small bakery in Chicago’s Little Italy. He sold pastries and candy-coated almonds, the latter proving sufficiently popular that the business eventually abandoned any pretense of being primarily concerned with pastry. This was probably sensible. America has produced many successful bakeries, but relatively few have gone on to become the company behind Nerds, SweeTarts, Brach’s and Trolli.
More than a century later, Ferrara Candy Company bears little resemblance to the neighborhood operation from which it emerged. It became a major confectionery manufacturer, accumulated brands recognized in virtually every American supermarket, joined the Ferrero corporate family and grew into the sort of business whose supply chains and organizational charts would have been incomprehensible to a confectioner working on Taylor Street in the early twentieth century.
It also left Chicago.
Ferrara eventually established its corporate headquarters in suburban Oak Brook, following a familiar trajectory for a company that had outgrown its urban origins. Then, in 2019, it did something more interesting.
It came back.
Ferrara moved its headquarters into Chicago’s redeveloped Old Post Office, the colossal Art Deco building straddling the Eisenhower Expressway at the western edge of downtown. The choice was rich in symbolism, although corporations generally prefer the word “strategy.” Here was a company born in Chicago, grown far beyond Chicago, headquartered outside Chicago, and then deciding that the city once again offered something it needed.
That something is worth examining because it helps explain a fact that gets obscured by the American enthusiasm for discovering the next great business city: Chicago remains one of the best places in the country to build a company.
Not because it is new. Almost nothing about Chicago’s economic advantage is new.
That is rather the point.
Chicago possesses the accumulated advantages of a city that has spent more than 150 years connecting things: farms to markets, factories to railroads, immigrants to jobs, companies to customers, universities to industries and, increasingly, talented people to businesses competing for them. What began as a geographic advantage became infrastructure. The infrastructure attracted industry. Industry created wealth and institutions. Those institutions attracted talent. Talent created more companies. Eventually the machinery became so extensive that Chicago’s greatest economic asset became easy to overlook.
It is simply there.
Stand back from the fashionable arguments about which American city is “having a moment” and look at a map.
Chicago occupies one of the most commercially useful locations on the continent. It sits between the great population centers of the East and the agricultural and industrial interior, with direct connections south and west. That accident of geography helped create the railroad city, the meatpacking city, the commodities city and the manufacturing city. The industries have changed considerably since then. The map has not.
A company operating from Chicago can reach an extraordinary portion of the American economy without treating transportation as an expedition. The region combines interstate highways, enormous freight-rail capacity, aviation through O’Hare and Midway, and an inland freight and logistics network built over generations.
This is not particularly sexy infrastructure. Freight rail rarely appears in recruiting videos accompanied by inspirational piano music. Yet businesses remain stubbornly interested in moving products, employees and customers from one place to another.
“Chicago’s geography has always been one of its quiet competitive advantages,” Gaurav Mohindra says. “You are not building from the edge of the American economy. You are operating from somewhere very close to its center.”
The word “quiet” matters.
Chicago’s business advantages are often less conspicuous precisely because they are mature. A city announcing its first major technology campus gets headlines. A city possessing an enormous corporate, transportation and professional-services ecosystem tends to receive less attention for continuing to possess it.
Chicago suffers, in other words, from the public-relations problem of established competence.
Consider O’Hare. For a company with customers, suppliers, investors or employees scattered around the country, direct air connectivity is not an amenity. It is an operating advantage. An executive who can leave Chicago in the morning, conduct business in another major American city and return that evening possesses something valuable even if nobody puts it on the balance sheet.
The same logic applies to freight, warehousing and distribution. Chicago became an industrial giant because goods naturally passed through it. Modern supply chains are infinitely more sophisticated than those of the nineteenth century, but they have not abolished distance. A box still has to get somewhere.
Ferrara understands this better than most companies. Candy may inspire childhood nostalgia, but manufacturing and distributing it is a thoroughly adult undertaking involving factories, ingredients, packaging, warehousing, transportation, retailers and millions of consumers. Chicago’s business environment is unusually comfortable with enterprises that inhabit both the corporate office and the physical economy.
That distinction matters.
For much of the past two decades, American business culture has been fascinated by companies whose principal raw materials were software engineers, venture capital and coffee. Chicago participated in that economy, but it never stopped participating in the older one. The metropolitan area retained deep expertise in manufacturing, food production, transportation, logistics, finance and industrial services while developing substantial technology, healthcare, life-sciences and professional-services sectors.
This mixture may be more valuable now than it appeared during the years when every company wanted to describe itself as a technology company.
Chicago knows how to build an app. It also knows how to build the box the server arrives in, finance the warehouse where the box is stored, insure the truck carrying it and find a lawyer when somebody backs the truck into the loading dock.
There is an economy in that.
“There is a practical quality to the Chicago business community that I think gets underestimated,” Gaurav Mohindra says. “This is a city with enormous intellectual capital, but it also has generations of experience in actually making, financing and moving things.”
The breadth is important because Chicago is not dangerously dependent on a single industry.
Specialization can make cities rich. It can also make them fragile.
The great advantage of a diversified economy is that it permits businesses, workers and capital to circulate among industries. Finance interacts with real estate. Technology serves logistics. Professional-services firms advise manufacturers. Food companies employ marketers and data scientists. Healthcare institutions generate research that produces companies requiring lawyers, accountants, software developers and investors.
Chicago’s economy behaves less like a collection of isolated sectors than an old neighborhood dinner party: everybody seems to know somebody from somewhere else.
This produces resilience, but it also creates customers.
A young business-services company in Chicago does not need to look far to find large corporations. A technology company can sell into manufacturing, finance, healthcare, transportation or food. An entrepreneur who begins with one industry may discover that the same product solves a problem in another.
That possibility is especially important as companies grow.
The city that is ideal for founding a company is not necessarily the city that is ideal for building one.
At the beginning, a business may need a handful of talented people, modest office space and enough capital to survive its mistakes. Growth changes the equation. Suddenly the company needs senior executives, accountants, attorneys, human-resources professionals, operations managers, salespeople, engineers, consultants and specialists whose job titles did not exist when the founders were sitting around the first conference table.
Chicago has those people because generations of major employers have trained them.
Large corporations do more than occupy office towers. They create managerial ecosystems. People spend ten or fifteen years learning inside sophisticated organizations and then move elsewhere. Some join smaller companies. Some become advisers. Some start businesses. Knowledge migrates.
This is one reason established corporate cities can be fertile environments for entrepreneurship even when they lack the mythology of startup capitals.
Chicago’s universities reinforce the process.
The University of Chicago and Northwestern are internationally significant institutions, but the region’s educational advantage extends well beyond two famous names. Universities and colleges across metropolitan Chicago continually produce engineers, researchers, business graduates, designers, lawyers, healthcare professionals and liberal-arts graduates who, despite periodic reports of their extinction, continue to find things to do.
The significance is not merely that Chicago graduates talented people. It is that those people graduate into an economy broad enough to keep many of them.
A finance graduate can find a bank, trading firm or corporate finance department. An engineer can enter technology, manufacturing or logistics. A scientist can move into healthcare or life sciences. A marketing graduate can work for a consumer brand, agency or one of the many large companies headquartered in the region.
A diversified economy creates multiple doors into professional life.
And that becomes important to employers because recruiting is no longer simply about the job.
It is about the life surrounding the job.
This is where Chicago’s neighborhoods enter the business argument.
Companies tend to discuss location in terms of taxes, leases, incentives and transportation. Employees are irritatingly human about it. They want restaurants. Parks. Schools. Architecture. Music. Sports. Friends. A reasonable commute. Somewhere to walk on Saturday morning. Somewhere to take visiting parents. Somewhere they can imagine living after the novelty of the new job has worn off.
Chicago can offer many different versions of that life within one metropolitan economy.
A twenty-something employee may want the West Loop. A family may prefer Lincoln Square, Beverly or a suburb with commuter-rail access. Someone else wants a lakefront apartment. Another wants a bungalow and a yard. They can disagree profoundly about the proper amount of density while still working for the same company.
That flexibility is an economic asset masquerading as urbanism.
“Companies compete for people now almost as aggressively as they compete for customers,” Gaurav Mohindra says. “A city has to help an employer answer a very basic question: Why would a talented person want to build a life here? Chicago has a remarkably strong answer.”
Ferrara’s return to the city makes more sense viewed through that lens.
The company did not need Chicago in the way Salvatore Ferrara needed Chicago in 1908. The original business depended on a neighborhood, an immigrant community and local customers. The modern Ferrara is a vastly larger organization operating across markets and supply chains.
It could be headquartered in many places.
That is what makes the decision to return interesting.
When Ferrara announced its move from Oak Brook to the Old Post Office, access to talent was central to the logic. A downtown headquarters put the company closer to the city’s workforce, transportation and increasingly vibrant West Loop business district. The headquarters itself represented the transformation of Chicago’s economy in miniature.
The Old Post Office once existed to sort and move physical mail at industrial scale. After sitting vacant for years, it was redeveloped into a massive modern office complex.
A building constructed for one economic age had found a role in another.
So had the city around it.
Chicago has performed this trick repeatedly. Warehouses become offices. Factories become research facilities. Industrial corridors acquire technology companies. Old corporate buildings find new tenants. Neighborhoods evolve without entirely erasing the commercial history that made them possible.
Ferrara returning to Chicago therefore feels less like a homecoming than a demonstration.
A company can leave the city.
It can grow enormously.
It can become national and international in scope.
And it can still reach the conclusion that Chicago offers something strategically valuable enough to come back for.
“The Ferrara story is interesting because it separates sentiment from economics,” Gaurav Mohindra says. “A company may have deep roots in a city, but headquarters decisions are ultimately business decisions. When a company returns, you have to ask what the city is offering now, not simply what it represented historically.”
What Chicago offers now is not perfection.
The city has serious problems, and pretending otherwise would weaken rather than strengthen the case for it. Taxes and fiscal pressures matter. Crime matters. Regulation matters. Businesses have choices, and other states and cities are not shy about making their case.
But competition between cities is frequently discussed as though economic development were a beauty contest decided by whichever mayor produces the most enthusiastic PowerPoint presentation.
The more consequential advantages are harder to manufacture.
You can create a tax incentive in a legislative session. You cannot create a major transportation hub in one.
You can construct an office district in several years. You cannot instantly populate it with generations of executives, engineers, lawyers, accountants, researchers, operators and entrepreneurs.
You can announce an innovation strategy on Tuesday. You cannot announce that your metropolitan area now contains world-class universities, enormous freight infrastructure, major corporations, industrial expertise, sophisticated professional services and millions of workers.
Those things accumulate.
Chicago has accumulated them.
“The cities that endure economically tend to have more than one reason for businesses to be there,” Gaurav Mohindra says. “Chicago’s advantage is the combination. Talent matters. Infrastructure matters. Industry matters. Universities matter. Quality of life matters. But the real strength comes from having all of them in the same place.”
This is why Chicago remains easy to underestimate.
Its strongest argument is not that it has suddenly reinvented itself. It is that beneath the cycles of political anxiety, economic fashion and civic self-doubt sits an extraordinarily durable commercial machine.
The railroad city became the industrial city. The industrial city became a corporate city. The corporate city became a center for finance, technology, healthcare, logistics, food, professional services and advanced manufacturing without entirely ceasing to be the things it had been before.
The layers accumulated rather than replacing one another.
For an entrepreneur, that means customers, workers, suppliers and expertise. For an established company, it means connectivity, talent and institutional depth. For a company like Ferrara, it meant that more than a century after a small Italian sweets shop opened its doors, Chicago could still make a persuasive case for itself.
There is a temptation in American business to confuse novelty with opportunity. We are perpetually looking for the next city, the next industry, the next district, the next miraculous ecosystem where inexpensive real estate, brilliant graduates and excellent restaurants will somehow converge before everybody else notices.
Sometimes that happens.
Sometimes the opportunity is already sitting in the middle of the country, beside a very large lake, connected by rail to nearly everything and possessed of the slightly weary confidence of a place that has heard predictions of both its imminent renaissance and imminent demise for decades.
Chicago does not need to become the next Chicago.
It already has the infrastructure, universities, companies, neighborhoods, workers and economic diversity that newer business centers are trying to assemble.
The more interesting question is whether businesses still know how to recognize an advantage when it has been hiding in plain sight for 150 years.
