The Monday before Easter, the candy-filled storefront at Wockenfuss Candies’ headquarters off Harford Road in Baltimore was bustling with customers preparing for the holiday.

As in a true family operation, Janice Wockenfuss-Motter, fourth-generation CEO, was on site. The bunny mold had already been put away, and now the focus was on crab-shaped chocolates in preparation for the summer. But she was happy about the Easter crowds all the same.

“We make bunnies in milk, dark, white, hollow, solid — everything from 2 inches tall to 15 inches tall ... maybe 75,000 bunnies [total] for the season,” Wockenfuss-Motter said. The candy company has seven retail stores across the state (the boardwalk location in Ocean City is seasonal).

While other stores’ shelves are lined with national Easter candy brands like the chick-shaped, neon-colored Peeps and Reese’s peanut-butter-filled eggs, Wockenfuss and other local candymakers also see big sales this time of year.

For Baltimoreans, buying Easter candy from local makers like Wockenfuss, Rheb’s Homemade Candies and Mary Sue Candies is a tradition. Gretchen Cassidy, 73, who was born and raised in Baltimore, says local candies taste better than those at Target and other stores.

“You stick with what you know,” said Cassidy, who now goes exclusively to the Wockenfuss store on Waltham Woods Road in Parkville after the Glauber’s Fine Chocolates store in Timonium closed. She still goes even though her daughters are now adults in their 30s and 40s.

“I still give them Easter baskets,” Cassidy laughed. “They expect it, and I can’t seem to get out of it.”

Peggy Adams, a Baltimore transplant who lives in Mount Vernon, has been coming to Wockenfuss since moving from Virginia eight years ago to retire.

She hadn’t heard of Wockenfuss before moving to the city, “but we’ve been busily learning about all the great things in Baltimore.”

Adams first learned of the candymaker from a Baltimore native. Her assortment of Easter purchases for her granddaughter included malted-milk eggs, chocolate eggs, a chocolate bunny and jelly beans.

West of Wockenfuss is Rheb’s. It had operated out of a single retail shop since 1917 before opening a second location in Mount Airy last year. Jarrod Bradley, part-owner along with members of the Rheb family, said Easter is their second-busiest holiday after Valentine’s Day.

“We kind of take Easter seriously over here,” Bradley said while looking at the production line where he has worked for almost 26 years. The eggs there are shaped by hand, not by mold. In addition to their handmade eggs, Rheb’s also sells a chocolate shaped like Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and a chocolate cross to commemorate the holiday.

Mary Sue Candies begins making its cream-filled Easter eggs the first week in January. The recipes are the ones founders Samuel “Sacha” Specter and his friend Harry Gerwig used when starting the candy factory in Southwest Baltimore in 1948. The business was named for Gerwig’s daughters, who both became nuns. They sold the business to Bill Buppert, who owns parent company Ruxton Chocolates, almost 25 years ago.

“It’s all the same recipes and techniques that they used way back when,” Buppert said. “It’s definitely important to our customers to not change anything, so we take that as a very important model for us.”

Mary Sue has no retail shop, but millions of its eggs are distributed to stores within 100 miles of their new Middle River manufacturing site, including Walmart and Wegmans. The company often gets letters from people who don’t use its formal address, but the Postal Service manages to deliver them anyway. Writers tell stories about enjoying Mary Sue’s Easter eggs and thank the company for sticking with the same candy-making traditions they’ve come to love.

Baltimore’s longtime candymakers have also fostered a kind of sweet tooth bond. Bradley says he has dined with Wockenfusses and shared condolences when family members die.

“We all kind of fill our own niche,” Buppert said. “We help each other out with ingredients and stuff like that. It’s a pretty cordial dynamic.”