JOYVA CORP. DEPENDING ON WHOM you ask, the Brooklyn-based Joyva Corporation ...

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DEPENDING ON WHOM you ask, the Brooklyn-based Joyva Corporation is best-known for its halvah. Or maybe it's known for the anachronous turbaned sultan that crowns its cans of tahini. Perhaps it's for the raspberry jell rings, which are as ubiquitous at the Passover table as they are on Korean deli counters, where they're sold for a quarter a pop.

It's telling that the company's first product change in more than a decade, which will occur this fall, isn't technically a new product—just a kid-friendly repackaging of an old one. The best-selling chocolate-covered raspberry jells have until now been available only in Russell Stover-sized and five-pound bulk boxes, but will soon be sold individually wrapped and three-to-a-pack.

The few changes that Joyva products have undergone in nearly 100 years may be the secret to their staying power. The operation has been based in New York City since 1906, when Nathan Radutzky started peddling halvah on the Lower East Side, spawning Independent Halvah, which by the 40s evolved into the Joyva.

Joyva has been producing tahini, halvah, jell rings, marshmallow twists and sesame crunch candy in Williamsburg for nearly 60 years. The entire operation takes place in three buildings: one with offices and a production facility for halvah and confections, another for warehousing and shipping, and a third dedicated solely to sesame seed processing.

The company imports anywhere between two and three million pounds of sesame seeds a year to make tahini, an ingredient essential to halvah. Richard Radutzky, grandson of Nathan and son of Milton, 82, who still comes to work every day, figures that his family's business is perhaps the largest single importer of sesame seeds in the country.

Radutzky, a former professional actor who joined the company 16 years ago, walks among the machinery that carries out the scrupulous tasks of sesame seed processing—sifting, soaking, removing hulls, brining, spinning, roasting and finally, squeezing to produce tahini. He points to a 40-pound bucket with the classic orange and brown Joyva design. "We put it in buckets like this for pretty much every pizza and falafel store in New York."

Years ago, a problem presented itself. "The tahini was over there," says Radutzky, "the halvah was over here, it got a little tiresome lugging that stuff over." That stuff would be up to 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of halvah each day. To solve the problem, Joyva installed a pipe that pumps tahini underground from one building to the other.

In other aspects of its production, Joyva remains decidedly old-fashioned. Most of the halvah-making process remains unmechanized; the bars are cut by machine, but the mixing is still done by hand.

Joyva products are sold all over the world, but here in New York, the entire product line can be found at Economy Candy on Rivington St.