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Sweet Tooth Candy Shoppe opens in new location

KATIE INGRAM SOUTH SHORE BREAKER katieyingram@gmail.com

As with many people his age, 17-year-old Mikka Kaulback has high school on his mind, but he's also thinking about the different types of candies he can sell.

Mikka is owner of Mikka's Sweet Tooth Candy Shoppe, which recently opened at the South Shore Centre in Bridgewater. It's a business he started when he was 14.

“The main reason we started it (is) because we didn't really know many people and we've been living in Bridgewater since 2010,” says Mikka.

With help from family members, he set up a stand

at his house, on his 90-footsquare porch, selling various candies and other sweet treats. Soon though, the business outgrew the small space.

“The town told us we could set up a shop, but if it got too busy, then we’d have to close down the shop because it is residential area,” he says. “So, after a few months, it got a little too busy. We did have to shut down and we went online

for a little bit; it was just our website for about a year.”

When he was offered a kiosk spot at the South Shore Centre, he took it, as it gave him a chance to have both an online and physical presence. He retained the kiosk for two years, along with the website, before an opportunity to open a larger store at the same location.

“I love the reaction that people have when they come into the store, especially the people that saw it when it was

just on the front of our house,” he says. “They come in and they’re just in awe because of all the candy that we’re able to pack in there.”

As mentioned, Mikka is always on the look out for new, popular and different candy to bring into Sweet Tooth. He recently bought a pucker powder machine from Canada’s Wonderland, something he drove to Ontario to get.

“It dispenses powder into your own straw,” explains Mikka, “and you can choose which flavours of powder you want in your straw.”

As for his favourite candy, Mikka says right now it’s freeze-dried candy, something which is popular on Tiktok.

“Basically, what that is (is) we take candy and we put it into a machine that freezes it. Then, it heats it up under pressure really fast and it blows up to sometimes triple the size that it was,” he says. “It … (takes) things that are sweet and makes them sweeter.”

Mikka isn’t thinking too much into the future yet; right now he’s focused on making customer experience as sweet as possible, both metaphorically and literally.

“It’s always a fun experience because some customers that come in on a weekly basis, we want to get them like, keep coming in and keep getting excited,” he says.

Along with its physical store in the South Shore Centre, Mikka’s Sweet Tooth Candy Shoppe can be found online at mikkassweettooth.com.

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2022-11-30T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-11-30T08:00:00.0000000Z

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