Pulling from the Past to Keep the Craft ALIVE!
This is my mission! I'm going on a three-phase journey to give old fashioned handmade hard candy a place in today's industrial world.
The art of candy making is disappearing. 🫣
Not slowly, either. The kind of handmade hard candy that's been made the same way for hundreds of years is vanishing from American food culture at a pace that should alarm anyone who's ever bitten into a piece and understood immediately that hand crafted candy is something different. 😍
I'm super-charging Mama T's Candy Lab!
I've been working with sugar for over three decades. 👵🏼I know what this craft really is, how long it takes to learn, how few people are still doing it at a production level, and I know that if people like me don't build something sustainable around it, it will keep dwindling until it's gone. 🥺
This journey is not just to sell more candy, but rather to prove that this craft can survive, grow, and thrive in the modern world. That handmade hard candy can reach people in all fifty states and beyond. 🌎 That a tiny kitchen in Texas can be a living classroom for a dying art, streaming production days in real time so anyone, anywhere, can watch it happen and fall in love with it the way I did. But the real bottom line - to help people create their happiness in this crazy world, one peice at a time. 🤗
YOU are the big piece!
But I can't build all of that at once, nor can I do it alone. So I'm asking you to come on the journey with me. 😊
Most crowdfunding campaigns ask for money & hope you don't ask too many questions. 🫣 That's not how I do things at Mama T's. 💜
I'm going to tell you everything - and I mean EVERYTHING! Where we're starting, where we're going, & exactly what your support makes possible at every step of the way. Because this isn't just a fundraiser. It's an invitation to watch something rare get built from the ground up, one piece at a time, & you get to be a founder. 💖
I believe in complete transparancy. So here's exactly what we're building & why I need you! 🥰
Phase One: The Batch Roller
Handmade hard candy starts as hot sugar poured on a slab and ends up pulled, twisted, & shaped entirely by hand. It's been done this way since before your great-great-great-great grandmother was a child. 😉 In 2026, I'm doing it in small batches as fast as my hands can move - but I am limited to what my two small hands can do. 🥺
A commercial batch roller changes that. It lets me roll candy faster, more consistently, and here's the exciting part - it opens the door to image candies! Image candies are those beautiful pieces where you find a design inside. 😍 This also makes it possible to do more custom orders, new product lines & get more candy in more hands helping to create more happiness! 🥳
With the batch roller, I can:
- produce more candy per batch, filling orders faster and keeping shelves stocked. 🍭
- add image candies to the product line! 🤩
- open up more custom orders: logos, names, shapes, colors - the candy made specifically for an event, a brand, a special moment. 🥳
- start generating the additional income that helps fund the phases ahead! 🤓
This is Phase One. It's how we get the lemon drop rolling! 😉 The goal for Phase One is $5500 USD.
Phase Two: Livestreaming Upgrade
Right now, I stream my candy-making lives using a couple of old iPhones & a wireless lav mic. People drop in, watch the sugar get pulled, ask questions, and leave craving the candy flavors I made that day. It's magic, and it's growing! 😎
Phase 2 takes that from "a chick with a couple of old phones" to something closer to a real show. Think: a candy kitchen you can drop into any time, like a window into a world most people have never seen. ✨
Phase 2 is about turning what we have into something that does justice to what's actually happening in that kitchen and my inspiration for this is the Venice Beach boardwalk livestream. It's a camera pointed at the ocean walk 24/7, just capturing life as it happens. You can drop in at any moment and the world is there, doing its thing. Buskers and skaters and strangers and sea air. No script. No performance. Just life... 😊
That's what I want Mama T's to be for handmade candy. A window that's always open when we're open with production quality that makes this feel like a show, because it *is* a show! One that's been going on in sugar kitchens for hundreds of years and almost nobody gets to see anymore. 💔
The Phase 2 gear list: Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera 4K G2 units permanently mounted & connected directly to the switcher with lenses to suit their location, an ATEM Mini Pro ISO, and a little more lighting. All of it wired together so that on a production day, the stream just *runs* & I can focus on the candy. 😎 Also a secondary iPad so I can see & reply to comments as they come in from where ever I'm at in the kitchen. 🥰
This is Phase 2. This is how we keep our community informed of what we are doing each day. It's that transparency I was talking about earlier... 😉Our goal is $7500.
Phase Three: The Commercial Kitchen
This is the big one.
A custom-built commercial candy kitchen - built for handmade hard candy production. Three-basin sink, candy stove, proper ventilation and fire suppression, refrigeration, prep tables, and everything else it takes to make candy legally, safely, & ready to ship across the nation & possibly world wide!
When this phase is complete, Mama T's Candies can ship anywhere in the United States. The "First Taste" vouchers held by our supporters finally get redeemed. And the craft that's been disappearing for decades gets a permanent home where it can be taught, shared, and kept alive for generations.
We're buying used wherever we can to keep costs real and the build moving fast. The fire suppression system is the main new purchase, and we've already got quotes. Realistically, once this phase is funded, we're looking at a 4-6 month build & inspection timeline.
When the Candy Lab is done:
- Mama T's ships candy nationally 🚚
- First Taste voucher holders get their candy 🥳
- We start developing candy lines for dietary limitations: sugar-free options& other products that let more people experience the joy of handmade candy 🤤
- We begin building toward a staff - prioritizing people who are marginalized or have difficulty finding traditional employment & paying a living wage. 💚
We're not just building a kitchen. We're building a place where a lost art lives on, where a community gathers, and where the sweetest things in life get made by hand and sent out into the world.
Come build it with us.