Savannah's Candy Kitchen Gets Chatty
It seems these days everyone wants to be chatty and write a blog. While we thoroughly enjoy reading them until recently we didn't realize what we were missing out on by not writing our own! For example, an opportunity to educate our friends on the difference between gelato and ice cream both can be found and enjoyed in their homemade perfection, at all of our locations. We were also missing out on the opportunity to talk with you! Sharing new things that are happening here at Savannah's Candy Kitchen and in the candy world in general. But have no fear we will rectify this, to kick things off we will begin with an introduction.
For those of you who don't know, we have been in the candy business for over 40 years! Stan "The Candy Man" Strickland and his family started this little project on River Street in Savannah, Georgia. In 1991 the doors to Savannah's Candy Kitchen were open for business. The first batch of our famous Original Pecan Praline passed the Strickland's taste test and were brought to River Street. Once Stan laid them out on a marble slab for customers to see, the heavenly, sugary scent drew passersby's into our store. A tradition was born and our recipe hasn't changed since, in ANY of our stores! Still to this day our stores still make their own homemade candies and offer fresh, delicious praline samples to anyone who walks in the door. The real luck would be catching a glimpse of the over flow production from our Salt Water Taffy machine, which is over 100 years old! In addition to our delectable recipes that have lasted through the years, we only use the freshest ingredients, zero preservatives, and have a strict no day old praline policy so you are getting the best and most fresh product you can possibly receive. What's sweeter than that?!
Our success was more than our stores could handle so a few years later in 1996 we expanded and moved into a factory location outside of town to handle our mail order demands. It turns out that people around the country had a hankering for our Southern delicacies and we are more than happy to fulfill their requests! A short while later we set our sites on City Market in the heart of downtown Savannah. What a great adventure that was! Right next to Vinnie Van Go-Go's we are serving up Savannah favorites alongside all of your favorite nostalgic candies.
Now 2003 was such a cool year; we brought Savannah's Candy Kitchen to North Market Street in Charleston, South Carolina. This was Savannah's Candy Kitchen's first venture outside of the Savannah area and it certainly wasn't our last!
In 2005 we decided that the Atlanta airport could really use a sugar rush so we brought our Southern delicacies to Concourse B in the Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport.
Those expansions kept us more than busy for a few years, until 2011 when we got the itch to start expanding again, this time taking our candy train all the way to Nashville, Tennessee. We hit a sweet note with the Music City when Savannah's Candy Kitchen made it's debut at 310 Broadway nestled next to Crazy Town we fit in like a charm! We fit in so well in fact that we decided to keep expanding; this time revisiting Hartfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport and setting up shop at Concourse C in 2012. We decided that we had given the Atlanta Airport enough of a toothache for now and had a chat with our friends Tim and Jennifer Strickland, the current owners of River Street Sweets, and came to the conclusion that our candy business was just too sweet to keep to ourselves! You know what that means; it was time to come up with a game plan to franchise our success! Our first franchise location opened in 2015 at the Tanger Outlet Mall in Pooler, Georgia.
With our franchise locations beginning to take off we decided to introduce the North to the sweet, slow, Southern delicacies that Savannah's Candy Kitchen had to offer and in 2016 we opened our location in National Harbor, Maryland.
That brings us up to 2017 and while our story is far from over, that's all we have to share! Hopefully this has given you a glimpse into our crazy, candy universe and be sure to look out for our next franchise locations coming soon to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Key West, Florida!