Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Bruce’s Candy Kitchen

Cannon Beach’s main street wouldn’t be the same without the iconic pink and white striped candy shop Bruce’s Candy Kitchen. Open for over sixty years, Bruce’s has become a popular stop for its famous salt-water taffy bins.

Owners Brian and Kelli Taylor met with the Main Street Mavericks to talk about inheriting a small business, working in a tourist town, and all the best things and challenges about working with candy.

Q&A With Bruce’s Candy Kitchen

Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your small business?

Brian: My name is Brian Taylor. I’m the owner, operator, production manager, janitor. That’s pretty much my position. Whatever it takes to get the job done, that’s my position here.

Kelli: I’m Kelli Truax-Taylor, and I’m co-owner of Bruce’s Candy Kitchen in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were established on April 1st, 1963, by Bruce and Treva Haskell and have been family-owned and operated ever since.

Brian: We are a small retail shop and manufacturer of confectionery goods. The basic title of what we do here. Part of it is a lot of candy-making. Saltwater taffy is our main seller here. And then we also make all the centers for our chocolates, dip our chocolates, fudge, caramel corn, brittles, toffees, all sorts of stuff.

Kelli: And sell lots of other fun stuff. We buy just about any candy I can find. I want to have the biggest variety. That’s my goal.

Brian: We sell 25 tons of taffy every year, so right out of these doors, there’s a lot of sugar. That’s the thing about when people come in here. It’s a time warp, right? Suddenly, they come in, and they are a kid in a candy store again. They tell me about the first they’ve been here; “I came here in 1972, June something,” and they’ll tell you the day. But it’s this time warp that they come in and just have this whole flood of emotions.

And so it’s great. So it’s one of those things; it is a tradition for people to come here and get candy. It’s our tradition to make them candy. So we all have our traditions that all are copasetic and work together and, so we aren’t here without our customers, right? Just like any business, but especially here — with all these generations of customers. And we have had five generations of candy makers work here.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

Kelli: We don’t know. We haven’t had to start out. We got a 41-year-old business when we returned to the family business after getting married and graduating college. But from watching other friends … I can say: grow slowly.

You don’t have to have more than one location; get that nailed down and figure out what you’re doing cause staffing is a huge thing. I would just be patient in your growth. I would just be like, don’t go too fast.

Brian: Mine would be don’t give up on your dream. Keep grinding. It might suck for a little while. Life has its ups and downs, but with those downs come those great ups. You’ve got to really stick with it. And my cliche, I always say, is: If you own it, you got to own it.

If you’re the owner, it doesn’t matter. You’re the one holding the buck, holding the bag, whatever it takes.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

Brian: Making your own schedule. That’s a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing because maybe you’re the only one on the schedule. Being able to make your own decisions. It’s your choice. Nobody else can make that decision for you. Those are probably the two best parts of it. Like I said, the flexibility and schedule. You have the freedom to do things, but you must also have employees do that.

Kelli: It’s not just us. That’s for sure. And I’d also say the flexibility and just, if we make decisions for us, what’s best for us, we’re not worried about someone else’s bottom line. It’s ours and our staff and our families.

What’s one challenge you’re facing, and how can the community help?

Kelli: Workforce housing is my biggest thing. I’ve got kids that want to work. They are out of their parents’ home. They’re ready to take that next step and just cannot find affordable housing. Just not enough options. We’re in a tough spot here being the tourist industry — there are a lot of second homes and rentals, but just not enough for the day-to-day workers. We just got to find some more places for them to live.

Brian: That’s the best thing the community could do — is focus on workforce housing. I think that’s what we’re facing. In a lot of small communities, especially something like Cannon Beach, you have a lot of top-level housing. You have beach homes that are going for millions of crazy dollars. Then there’s how you get people here to work. They either live in Warrenton or Seaside or somewhere else, but that would probably be the challenge here.

What are some of the specific challenges of running a candy store?

Brian: Chocolate prices right now are crazy. The market is very volatile.

And so we’re lucky that we make taffy fudge with all sorts of different things that aren’t chocolate. Chocolate makes about one-third or so of what we actually produce. So we’re able to weather that particular storm.

There have been a few supply chain issues, like rebounding from the corn syrup shortage. We go through a lot of corn syrup. So we had some corn syrup issues when there was a bad crop again. And so all the big players like Coca-Cola and those guys said, we’re taking all the corn syrup. Good luck, everybody. And so there was a time when it was a month, and I couldn’t get any corn syrup.

And that’s one of the main ingredients in Taffy. So that’s just one of our struggles there.

Do you have a favorite candy?

Kelli: I like sour apple taffy. It would be my favorite taffy flavor. And our Cashew Crab, which is caramel chocolate and cashews. That is my favorite treat we make. But anything just depends on the day and what I’m in the mood for. So, I don’t have to choose. I’m not tired of it yet. Forty-four years, and I can still find something to eat.

Brian: That’s right. And I usually go with a truffle of some kind. We make all our centers here. So it’s a chocolate ganache, heavy whipping cream, chocolate, and flavor. So right now, I’ve been eating a lot of the coconut one, which actually is a non-dairy truffle because I use coconut milk.

What’s the future look like for Bruce’s Candy Kitchen?

Brian: My goal, because I also repair and refurbish these [taffy] machines, is to, at some point, travel around and just tinker around with machines and help people out. That would be something I would do in retirement when I’m in my 60s. Sounds so fun. I’ve gone to places and helped with machines, but I usually don’t have to fix the machine. I usually fix their candy.

They just bought this machine, and they got this recipe, and nothing works. And I’m like: this machine does one thing, and it will do it. Your recipe sucks. You just have to be honest with them. Let them get over that, and now we’re gonna fix it. We don’t change ingredients — it’s a process, a ratios thing. We just make it so candy will run through the taffy machine.

Did you say you guys have other friends who run candy shops?

Kelli: Yeah, we’re in a candy club. The RCI — Retail Confectioners International. And it’s fellow candy store owners.

Brian: We just wrote an article on our soft peanut brittle because they were like, “Oh, we’ve just heard of this, and you said you make it. So do you want to write an article and give us a recipe?”

Kelli: We share a lot of things. It’s a very open group, like, “Hey, this isn’t working. What’s going on with you guys?” It’s really helpful. And it’s a group of people that want to share.

Brian: If you’re having trouble with something, you say, “Hey, I’m having trouble with this. What are you [struggling with]? Here’s my recipe. Here’s what we do.” It’s very unique.

Is there a misconception about running a candy store that people have?

Kelli: It’s physically demanding, like the taffy making’s one thing, but I’m unpacking hundreds of thousands of pounds of candy a day.

Our kids, they’re on their feet constantly for eight hours, and it’s a short turnaround; it’s not like waitressing where you’re dealing with someone for two hours or an hour and a half; it’s a five-minute exchange, but it’s physically a lot.

There’s a lot of lifting.

Brian: So, like I said, there’ll be people who are trying to start a business, and this is their retirement. So there’ll be a, let’s say, a 60-year-old woman who’s just retired; she wants to make taffy. And I’m like, no, you don’t. This is, it’s physical labor.

If you want to make money, you’re going to be challenged physically. It challenges me. After eight to 10 hours, I am done. And So I’m just like, I always try to talk people out of it before they get started. I don’t want to shatter their dreams, but I want to be completely honest with them that this is very labor intensive, and if you want to make money out of it, it will be even harder. And then these machines don’t have a heart or a brain, so they don’t really care what you think. You can’t talk to them and make them work harder.

Talking about how Bruce’s Candy Kitchen is magical

Brian: The people part of it is the best — having the customers always come in, it’s new faces and the same faces too. People year after year. And so you get to know them, right? So there are a lot of customers with whom I’ve become friends over the years. You exchange numbers with people.

They come every year. We had a kid whose parents would come to the conference center, and every year, he’d, or at least a couple of years in a row, he’d drop me a picture of the machine. He had the brightest red hair, and we always remember him. And then, he ended up going to Ecola Bible School. So he came and worked for us. It was like his dream; he told us, I’m gonna come work here. Yeah. And so he did for a couple of years.

That’s really the fun part: the people we meet and the candy bring people together.

Another story. I had a gentleman standing outside watching the taffy machine route. And he walks in and says, “This place is magic.” I said, “Oh yeah, of course it’s magic.”  You can get two types of people who, on any level, hate each other, like wanna kill each other, but you can stand right next to each other and watch this machine and have something in common and not even worry about that. They just ask questions about the machine — and they would otherwise want to be at war with each other.

That’s why it’s magic right here. So it’s very nice. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the whole thing. It’s a little bit of magic, right?

Kelli: Almost as cool as Disneyland.

Vendor Round-Up

And which of our vendors and partners are assisting Bruce’s Candy Kitchen on its small business journey?

What site does Bruce’s Candy Kitchen use for eCommerce? Shopify.

What POS do you use? Square.

Who is your credit card processor? Square.

Who do you use for business banking? U.S. Bank and Umpqua Bank.