Why I Built an American Candy Brand Around the Way I Grew Up Eating in Austria

Süss is the German word for sweet. I chose it because it's simple and honest and because it's the word I grew up with.

I was born in Austria. My mother was from Vienna. Growing up, the way she cooked and the food she bought followed a set of standards I didn't think much about at the time because I had no reason to. They were just the baseline. Food was food. Real ingredients. Nothing artificial, not because we were making a health statement, but because that's what food was. That was Europe in the eighties and nineties. You read labels. You knew what things were.

When I moved to the United States and eventually started making candy in 2023, I carried those expectations with me. Not as a philosophy. Just as a habit of mind. What's in this? Can I say the name of every ingredient without looking it up?

The Choice I Made Before I Even Thought About It

American food law did not require me to make candy the way I make it. I could have used artificial dyes. I could have used synthetic flavors. I could have cut costs in ways that would be completely legal and that most American consumers would never notice.

I didn't, because it never occurred to me to. My mother didn't read a label and choose the cleaner option as some kind of deliberate act. She just bought food that was made from food. I did the same thing when I started making candy. Beets for red. Turmeric for yellow. Spirulina for blue. Purple carrot for purple. Red radish or Hibiscus for pink. Plant-based colors because that's what color is.

Organic sweetened condensed milk in the caramels. Organic unsalted butter. Light Grey Celtic sea salt from Selina Naturally, because it has a mineral depth that table salt just doesn't. Natural and organic flavors throughout. None of this is complicated. It just requires caring about it.

What That Looks Like in Practice

Every batch of my Celtic Sea Salt Caramels is small. I make them by hand, cooking the caramel to 245F for that soft chew texture, then depositing them into silicone molds. The process is slower than industrial production. That's the point. I know exactly what happened to every piece.

My chews are individually wrapped in resealable 80-gram bags. The Sour Watermelon Chews are a good example of what I mean by clean candy with real flavor. Bright, tart, actual watermelon taste. Nothing that lingers in a chemical way.

The Coffee Caramel Gift Box uses coffee from local and boutique roasters. I won't source it from somewhere I don't know. That matters to me, the same way it mattered to my mother where her bread came from.

And the Honey Lemon Lollipops are made with local honey from Maries Bees and colored with turmeric. That's a very Austrian sensibility, actually. Honey as an ingredient, not a flavor additive.

Why I'm Telling You This

I'm not interested in competing with mass-produced candy on price. I never was. What I'm interested in is making something I'm genuinely proud of. Something my mother would recognize as food.

For European buyers especially, I think Süss will feel familiar in a way that most American candy doesn't. The ingredient lists are short. The colors come from plants. The flavors are real. The batches are small enough that I actually know when something is off and can fix it before it goes out.

That's not a marketing pitch. That's just how I was taught to think about food.

Süss means sweet. It's the right word for what I'm trying to make.