Tom & Jenny’s 2024: No-Guilt Candy

DeliveryRank chats with Tom and Dr. Jenny who started experimenting in their home kitchen to create delicious, healthy, sugar-free candies. After countless batches, they perfected a recipe combining natural ingredients and great flavors, leading to the creation of their brand. 

What inspired you to start experimenting with sugar-free recipes, particularly in creating a caramel that tastes just as indulgent as the traditional version? 

Jenny: We LOVE candy and sweet snacks because that one perfect bite can bring so much joy. But we were always less than thrilled with the sugar-free candies out there. They just had too many weird ingredients and usually left a very bad aftertaste. As a brand-new dentist in my first year, I wanted to find better snacks I could recommend for my patients and family. At the same time, I had been reading about all the great sugar alternatives that were discovered in nature, including some that were actually very good for teeth and had lower net carbs. 

Tom: That’s when I started coming home to find Jenny’s candy experiments covering our tiny apartment kitchen. Soon I couldn’t resist jumping in to help. For our first two years, before we really even had a company and before we had kids, this was one of our fun weekend hobbies. 

We would spend a lazy Saturday going for a jog together, having some yummy food, then firing up our stove to cook a bunch of candy experiments. Once we started realizing we could make something sugar free that tasted so good, it became like a game. Could we make the next batch good enough to trick our neighbors and coworkers into believing the sugar-free caramels we were making were full of sugar? 

Jenny: And eventually we did! Along the way we held hundreds of blind taste tests and eventually got to a point where our caramels were outscoring leading national sugar caramel brands! And best of all, when we asked participants to identify the sugar-free caramel in the bunch they were often surprised that any of the candies they’d taste tested were sugar-free. That’s when we knew we were onto something. 

As a pediatric dentist, Dr. Jenny, how did your professional background influence the development of your sugar-free caramel recipes? 

Jenny: Actually treating dental patients and seeing what all the sugary treats did to their teeth is what inspired me to start Tom & Jenny’s.

Early on, in my first few months practicing dentistry, I remember getting frustrated that candy and soda brands got to talk to my patients every day, while I only got to see them once every six months, if I was lucky! It was a very unfair fight and the sugary brands were winning, which showed up in my office in the form of worse and worse tooth decay! Over 90% of Americans will struggle with cavities at some point in their lives. That number is shocking! On top of that, we have skyrocketing rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, even among children! Diet is at the root of all of those epidemics. 

So I decided I wanted to create a brand that would let me get the message out about how bad excessive sugar is for you, and show that there could be delicious alternatives that didn’t have to have sugar OR be jammed full of artificial ingredients. And from the very beginning, Tommy and I knew we needed to make sure our products tasted no different from sugar candies. In every conversation I had with patients, I’d recommend sugar free candies that were already on the market, but they’d usually grimace and tell us they didn’t like the taste or weird artificial ingredients in those candies. So we knew that if our caramels didn’t taste amazing, customers weren’t going to switch. 

Tom and Jenny's Sugar-Free Caramels have gained a reputation for using high-quality, natural ingredients. Could you share more about your ingredient sourcing process and how you maintain the balance between flavor and health benefits? 

Tom: When we started our company, we went through countless sugar-alternatives and hundreds of test batches to try every combination of sweetener. At every step we would take detailed notes on how our tweaking impacted flavor and mouthfeel. During that process, we also learned about the food ingredient industry from scratch. We learned the value of using real cream from local cows. We learned how food manufacturers use flavor additives and colors, in some cases to trick the customer’s senses. We decided we didn’t want to use any of those tricks. No artificial flavors or colors. We wanted to get as much of our flavor as possible from real ingredients like vanilla, cocoa, ginger and fresh spices. And if we ever used a flavor, like our natural rum flavor, we were going to pay a lot of attention to the quality of it and ensure it was all-natural. 

We found that the sweeteners that tasted best in our caramels cost about 3-5x more than sugar or corn syrup. But that’s what we were going to use because it tasted best. And we learned all about how to find sustainably sourced palm oil and ensure the ingredients we used weren’t contributing to deforestation. 

Any time we create a new product or need to change our formula, we taste test extensively, often delaying the launch of our products to make sure the taste is as perfect as possible.

You’ve mentioned that customer feedback has played a crucial role in developing some of your flavors. Could you share a story of how customer input directly led to the creation of a new product? 

Jenny: Early on we had only one flavor: our classic caramel, which is still our best seller. And then we partnered up with Chef Michael Laiskonis, a James Beard Award winner, who was convinced we could make a delicious chocolate flavored caramel. Over the course of three or four months he helped prove we could do that. We’d go back and forth to his test kitchen and get to try a huge number of variations he helped us cook. But the rubber really hit the road when we started selling at small farmers markets and hosting tasting events. Customers would give us real-time feedback as they tasted the candy and that helped shape further tweaks, we made to our recipes. 

The most common request we heard at those in-person events was for a ginger flavor. We noticed we were hearing this a lot from women with small children or pregnant women, because often they had motion sickness or nausea. We liked that idea because we use a lot of ginger in our cooking at home and love a nice spicy ginger flavor. And then we decided we wanted more than just three flavors. So we emailed surveys to our customer base for their favorite flavor ideas. Coffee rose to the top. And the second favorite was a tie between cinnamon spice and rum, so we decided to combine the two ideas into a spiced rum flavor! 

In case you’re keeping count, that means customer feedback (plus the professional opinion of one amazing pastry chef) are responsible for 4 out of our 5 current flavors! And we hope to grow that number even more. Beyond just new flavor offerings, we hope one day soon we’ll be able to say that our customers are responsible for entire new product lines as we move to expand our candy and snack offerings. 

Creating over 200 test batches to perfect your caramel recipe shows immense dedication. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during this process, and how did you overcome them? 

Tom: We’re a bootstrapped startup, meaning we’ve never raised outside funding. And when we started the company, we were both at the early stages of our careers, so we didn’t have a lot of savings. We had to learn how to produce candy for sale on a shoestring budget. We found cheap commissary kitchen space, which we’d rent late nights to get the cheapest shifts. We adopted a lean mentality – testing every theory we had at very small scales, so the experiments were cheap. We never sunk a lot of money into making large batches of our product until four or five years into the life of our company, because we just couldn’t afford it. But the benefit of that

was that we really perfected the recipe in hundreds of small trials and knew we had a winner before we ever risked a large investment. 

Then, when it was time to invest more in packaging and larger purchases of ingredients, we entered a few business plan competitions and won $90,000 to help give us the funding for bigger production and marketing efforts. 

Later, we moved into a house with a larger kitchen and got licensed by the state for home-based production to help save on costs. We’d experiment there and run small production runs with a rotating group of about 15 college students we hired to help hand cut and wrap our candies. Those were such fun, but hard times because we were really in the trenches doing hard physical labor! 

Despite not having the money to grow our operation exponentially from Day 1, Jenny and I were lucky enough to have that shared sense of dedication to this dream from the very start. That has helped guide us and our problem-solving strategies throughout the early days of our business and into today. From hundreds of at-home test batches, to thousands of pallets of finished products, we still rely on dedication to help us overcome the challenges of owning a small business.

If you would like to learn more about Tom & Jenny’s, please visit https://tomandjennys.com/