The opening weekend was sunny and bright in Vancouver and thus brought us lots of visitors to the Vancouver Christmas Market and many of them were very interested in our candies. Some told us they know these candies from their childhood, especially the Peppermint Pillows with choco filling and the sweet Raspberries. The response is just overwhelming.

In the middle of the week it started to rain and didn’t really stop. This is very unfortunate for the market, however, a few people came out and enjoyed all markets attractions without lining up.

On Thursday we were approached by CBC Vancouver to give a live interview from inside our candy hut for the 6 pm news. This was an amazing opportunity for us to present our candies in the Canadian television. Our team member Stephanie gave the interview and gave a few insights about the candies and the producer Wilhelm Mueller from Germany. Below you can watch the video.

After the interview the reporter team tried our candies and fell in love with them immediately. Who knows, they might come back for another round of candy sampling.

Today, it was still a bit rainy, but we really hope people will still come anyways to the market to enjoy the good food and grab a mulled wine to stay warm.

You are welcome to come by and try all the different flavours of our natural candies.

So I start doing research in the internet and find various candy producers of different sizes, types and prices. Since we are from Berlin, I’m getting in touch with the Bonbonmacherei, located in the Heckmann Höfe, Berlin. The Bonbonmacherei produces a whole variety of absolutey delicious hard candies, all hand-made. Unfortunately, they don’t have the capacity to sell their products to a commercial Christmas market retailer.

After a little bit more research I’m in contact with three medium size hard candy producers and contact them for some samples. I receive in total more than 70 different types of hard candy from three producers and all want to be sampled and rated.

I design a rating scheme for the different candies and force my friends in Germany and Canada to do some hard core candy sampling. The result justifies the method,… after having the rating from around ten people I could clearly see which candy types are liked the most and I even could see the difference between Germans and Canadians (hopefully).

The result helped as well well to identify which producer makes the best tasting candies. According to our sample candidates it is Wilhelm Mueller – Spezialfabrik fuer Kraeuterbonbons from Duisburg, Germany. The Mueller candies are a little bit more expensive as the candies from the other producers, but therefore the candies don’t have any artificial flavours, all ingredients are natural and gluten free. I’m sure we did the right choice!