Cocoa, Milk, and Sugar Silos

Visible from the 480 freeway, three bright pink silos marked “Cocoa,” “Milk,” and “Sugar” sit on the grounds of Malley’s Chocolates in Brook Park. The location is home to the company’s chocolate factory and a shop lined with shelves painted in a shade staff simply call “the Malley pink.” (The color is hard to put your finger on, but it’s quite close to Baker-Miller pink, which has famously been shown in psychiatric experiments to have a calming effect.) Malley’s has been a local institution since opening their first, much more modest shop in Lakewood in 1935. Erected at Brook Park in 2011, the silos each measure 12 feet wide and 88 feet tall, and can hold up to 100,000 pounds of raw material. Malley’s originally planned to use them to store milk, cocoa, and sugar, which would have been moved into the building through an underground vacuum pipe system, but they wound up scrapping that plan before the silos were fully installed.

Now purely decorative, the silos nevertheless have a history that reflects the changing industrial landscape of the region. The distinctiveness and monumentality of the silos has turned them from a simple branding gimmick into a local landmark, often used for wayfinding. They were sourced from the former Laich Industries Corp., located on Keystone Parkway, directly across the freeway from the Malley’s factory. Laich made injection-molded plastic housewares such as resin furniture, dishpans, and sink sets, as well as sports novelty items, until they declared bankruptcy in 2005 after losing significant business to competitors in Asia.

They had never used the silos, which were intended to hold plastic pellets, and Malley’s snatched them up after a wider search for parts had failed. The silos were originally white, and had to be painted pink—in what became a more complicated task than anticipated—by a commercial sign painter, before the letters spelling each word were then applied in black on both the front and back of the silos. Malley’s does not disclose where they source materials for their chocolates, but they did indicate that their cocoa, milk, and sugar all come from outside of northeast Ohio, bringing a tale of globalization full circle.