Think your holidays are busy? Try launching a candy company.
In 2009, for eight straight weeks leading up to Christmas, Liz Gutman and Jen King worked nonstop 16- to 20-hour days melting nougat, tempering chocolate, heating honey, hand-wrapping lollipops and otherwise launching their new candy brand: Liddabit Sweets. Read our full story here, but this is the sweet upshot: by New Year’s the now-iconic confectioners had won rabid fans of their craft candy.
In the five years since, they’ve built a serious artisan empire out of lollipops, brittles, candy corn and caramels, complete with a new HQ at Industry City — home to both production space and a flagship store. Today they take occasional days off, but still make all their candy by hand, in small batches, from the best locavore ingredients they can get their hands on. It turned out Brooklyn had an insatiable appetite for candy made from local cream, real fruit, maple syrup and coarse sea salt. Our photo editor, Scott Gordon Bleicher, went behind the scenes to shoot this video of how the magic happens.
