They’ll Take You to the Sweet Store
Earlier this yr, the an identical twins Adeev and Ezra Potash, who’re from Omaha, Nebraska, have been named that state’s first-ever Composer Laureates. As adolescents, Adeev (trumpet) and Ezra (trombone) caught the eye of Warren Buffett, who employed them to play at Berkshire Hathaway shareholder conferences; in highschool, they have been inspired to use to conservatories by Wynton Marsalis, with whom they’ve since carried out. As adults, they’ve recorded and launched three albums and written scores for “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” If there’s something they’re extra dedicated to than music, it’s sweet. On a current Tuesday afternoon, the brothers, sporting matching cherry-red-and-lime-green eyeglasses, browsed the pick-and-mix bins at Kändi, a Swedish-style sweets store in Los Angeles. They have been joined by the actor Martin Starr, the co-founder of their new sweet firm, Candy Stash, and by Ellen Van Dusen, of the cult housewares line Dusen Dusen, who’d designed the brightly coloured packaging for his or her first product: a bag of multi-flavored gummies within the form of music notes, referred to as Jams, which débuted this month.
“Ez and I don’t like marshmallow sweet as a lot, so we gained’t even make it to that facet,” Adeev stated, gesturing towards the bins farthest from the door. The indifference prolonged even to Bubs, foamy, marshmallow-adjacent disks from Sweden that surged on TikTok final yr, inflicting a worldwide scarcity. “I like the feel of Bubs, for positive, for, like, an intermezzo,” Ezra stated. “After you get a pair bitter, you desire a conventional non-citric sugarcoated merchandise. In the event you simply do bitter, bitter, bitter, the impact—”
“He’s ridiculous,” his brother interrupted.
“I like every part,” Starr, who was closely bearded and wore a T-shirt with a cranium and crossbones and the phrases “HAVE A NICE DAY!,” stated. “I began stealing gummy bears after I was a child. I didn’t get sufficient assets financially from my mother and father to afford my habit.” His mark was the native 7-Eleven. “I bought busted sooner or later, they usually have been, like, ‘By no means come again.’ I got here again the subsequent day and nobody cared.”
After filling their luggage with an array of gummies—Starr was particularly excited a few sour-kiwi selection he’d by no means seen earlier than—the group relocated to a espresso store subsequent door to recount Candy Stash’s origins. For years, the twins have carried out at a charity occasion in Chicago hosted by Walgreens. “On our rider, we had sweet, and so the Walgreens individuals have been, like, ‘Oh, they know their sweet. Let’s be sure they meet our head sweet purchaser, Brian Rinker,’ who we’ve turn into tremendous good mates with,” Ezra stated. “He’s the No. 1 sweet purchaser on this planet. I’ve heard his face is on the water tower on the Haribo manufacturing facility.” Subsequent got here an invite to a dinner with a number of executives from main sweet producers, which led to a shock supply to the brothers’ home in Palm Springs. “Not solely pallets however full vans of our favourite sweet,” Adeev recalled.
“Twelve hundred luggage of Twizzlers!” Ezra stated. “They began sending us their unreleased sweet, with handwritten notes, like, ‘Hey, are you able to please ship your suggestions to this individual?’ ”
Starr and the twins grew to become mates, in 2022, after assembly at one other charity occasion, hosted by celebrities, together with Jason Sudeikis and Paul Rudd, in Kansas Metropolis. (Rudd occurs to co-own a sweet retailer referred to as Samuel’s Candy Store, within the Hudson Valley.) “When Martin was, like, ‘I’m obsessive about sweet,’ we have been, like, ‘No approach, not close to our degree of obsession,’ ” Adeev stated. “After which, the primary time we went over to his home, he opened his cabinets of sweet, and it was stuff from all around the world—a few of which we’d by no means tried. The blind spots we had, he utterly had coated.”
For Candy Stash’s début product, they aimed for a “basic American-style gummy, however with the data of the flavour improvement of Swedish sweet and Japanese sweet,” Ezra stated. “American sweet tends to have a flatter palette,” Starr stated. “In Japan, they take note of the variations between flavors, even inside one single fruit household.” The trio spent hours writing tasting notes: inexperienced grape ought to be “like biting right into a crushed, barely underripe grape, with the identical acquainted crispness,” then soften into “a wealthy, juicy sweetness that rounds out the tartness” and “a easy, melon-like end.” For white peach, they have been preoccupied with “fuzz,” which Starr described as “virtually a numbness—it looks like static on the tongue.” “We despatched it out to taste homes,” Starr stated. “A few of them returned a number of variations, as a result of we’d return and say we would like extra fuzz.”
“Fuzz was our Moby Dick,” Ezra stated.
On texture, the twins had been completely satisfied to compromise. “Our ideally suited texture is Haribo, however we perceive that, like, ninety-nine per cent of the planet thinks Haribo is simply too chewy,” Adeev stated. “We’ve been known as extremists within the firmness division.” (On the dinner with the sweet executives, they’d shared their penchant for “dry-aging” softer gummies within the fridge.) For the packaging, Van Dusen—who’d met Starr by means of a mutual pal, a dressing up designer who’d instructed him as a mannequin for her line of bathrobes—consulted a temper board they’d despatched her, which included a few of her personal candy-colored merchandise, in addition to a Keith Haring doodle. Van Dusen had been an apparent collaborator. A number of years prior, as a visitor at her wedding ceremony, Starr had introduced her “5 or 6 particular luggage of Japanese sweet that I assumed she’d like,” he recalled. “She was a bit drunk, to be honest, however one in every of her mates requested if he may have one piece, and he or she stated, ‘Completely not.’ ” ♦
