About Sweetness and Light

The Shop

Sweetness and Light has been making candy in the heart of Ferndale since 1976. We're still a little candy shop on Main Street, and we're stubbornly old-fashioned about what comes out of our kitchen.

We cook caramel and cream centers in copper kettles, cool candy on marble slabs, temper Guittard chocolate for dipping, and make our candy one batch at a time. We use local cream and butter, and we don't use preservatives in the candies we make. Some equipment has changed over the years, but when a recipe and a method work, we don't see much reason to mess with them.

That matters especially because some of our recipes are much older than Sweetness and Light itself. Tami's family has roots in candy making in Ferndale going back generations, and after we bought the shop, her grandfather gave us a small family recipe book dating to the 1800s. Our caramel, Victoria Creams, and Buttermilk Creams are still made from recipes in that book, the same way they were written.

Matt and Tami

Matt started working at Sweetness and Light in 2000, making candy in the kitchen. In 2005, Matt and Tami bought the shop and became its fourth owners. We didn't know at the time that some of the recipes we had taken responsibility for were connected to Tami's own family history. That discovery came later, when her grandfather told us about the family's candy-making past and gave us the old recipe book.

We've kept making the old recipes, but Sweetness and Light hasn't stood still. Over the years we've developed plenty of candies of our own, while keeping the same basic approach: good ingredients, careful candy making, and no shortcuts just to make something faster or easier to produce.

Today it's just the two of us. Matt makes the candy, and Tami runs the front of the shop. Everything you find in our online store is made right here in our kitchen at 554 Main Street in Ferndale.

If you're in Ferndale, stop in and see us. We're right next to the post office at 554 Main Street.