SWEET STUFF IS SPUN INTO PROFIT
Wed ,08/09/20100 Comments | Palm Beach Post, Aug 7, 2004 | by PHIL GALEWITZ Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
With a dozen machines swirling fluffy blue and red cotton candy into operators’ gloved hands and the smell of the confection waffling in the air, the place looked like something out of a young child’s dream.
This is the home of Fun Sweets Inc., a growing cotton-candy enterprise tucked into an old warehouse at the back of a small industrial park west of Interstate 95.
Despite the hoopla about low-carb dieting, business has been booming of late.
In the past two years, the company’s 2-ounce package of cotton candy has gone on sale at Publix Super Markets and some Winn-Dixie stores.
In addition, Fun Sweets is the sole supplier of prepackaged cotton candy to Disney World, Universal Studios and Kennedy Space Center.
The company sells about 50,000 containers a week using about 7,500 pounds of sugar to make it.
“We want to be the Ben and Jerry’s of cotton candy,” said Patrick Fulco, who, along with partner David Dayan, has been running Fun Sweets since 1997.
The private company with 15 full-time employees is proving that cotton candy is not only for festivals and circuses, but also it can be a treat to keep at home.
The sweet treat dates to 1903, when William Morrison and John Wharton patented their electric candy machine.
The machine cooked sugar in a container connected to an electric motor.
When the motor turned, the centralized force pushed the melted sugar through pinhole-sized openings in the container.
Fine sugar filaments collected in an outside pan, where the operator gathered a cloud-like serving.
In 1904, the candy, then sold as “Fairy Floss,” made its big debut at the world’s fair in St. Louis.
While Fun Sweets’ cotton candy tastes much like any other that you’ve bought at a local fair – after all, it’s nothing but sugar and artificial coloring – the secret to the company’s recent success is in its packaging.
Traditionally, cotton candy has been sold in a cellophane bag that had a shelf life of only a few weeks.
Fun Sweets designed a vacuum-sealed plastic container that can keep cotton candy fresh and fluffy for up to a year.
That appealed to major retailers. For consumers, the appeal is that you can eat some of the candy then store the rest in the tamper- proof package.
“We came up with a new twist for an old product,” Fulco said.
Fulco stumbled into the cotton candy business almost by accident.
From 1985 to 1993, he ran a food-and-drink-vending business with his father, serving many local car dealerships.
After selling that business, Fulco bought a small snack route and started popping his own popcorn and selling it.
In 1994, Fulco looked to expand into caramel corn popcorn.
When he approached a woman to buy the supplies from her old carnival business, she persuaded Fulco to buy the cotton-candy machine, too.
The caramel corn idea never went anywhere, but the cotton candy showed promise from the start and has started to take off the past two years with the new packaging.
Today, Fun Sweets is sold across the United States, Scandinavia, France, Ireland and Japan.
The company does no advertising, but benefitted greatly when Publix and Winn-Dixie began selling it at the checkout counter.
With business picking up, the company now makes cotton candy 18 hours a day and is gearing up to move into a new bigger production location in West Palm Beach to keep up with demand.
phil_galewitz@pbpost.com
Fun Sweets Inc.
Headquarters: Lake Worth
Business: Cotton-candy maker
Customers: Supermarkets, convenience stores, theme parks
Cotton candy price: About $1.59 a package
Full-time employees: 15