The wait is over: Twisted Sugar opened its doors to the eager Valpo community on Friday, October 28. The West Coast-based company offers cookies, sodas and other specialty creations just down the street near Promenade Apartments.
Valpo has seen other candy stores such as Crumbl Cookies, Parlor Donuts and Rocket Fizz open in recent months, but Twisted Sugar hopes to provide a new experience for students and the larger Valpo community.
Megan Thompson, owner alongside her husband Tony, discovered Twisted Sugar two years ago on a trip to visit her sister in Utah. Thompson asked her sister to help her find the next big trend she could bring to the Midwest.
“My expectations were pretty high… I spent five days there with her, and the first day she took me to a Crumbl and I was quite impressed. Then she took me to a few other franchises that existed, one of them is called Swig, another is called Sodalicious,” Thompson said. “After the third day of candy loading, I told her, ‘It’s so much fun,’ and she replied, ‘I saved the best for last.’
Thompson then visited Twisted Sugar and immediately knew she had him to take him back to Northwest Indiana.
“I set foot in this bakery and fell in love with it. It was the design, the variety of cookies was three times that of previous bakeries I’ve been to and they also offer drinks,” said Thompson “It was a one stop shop and I was so enthralled by the process of baking 18 to 24 different varieties of cookies a day.”
Once her husband was on board, Thompson quickly got to work bringing the franchise to the area.
“We spoke to the owners of Twisted Sugar and we opened our first Twisted Sugar in Crown Point on September 16,” Thompson said. ” [On Oct. 28,] we open[ed] our second Twisted Sugar location in Valpo on campus, we couldn’t have asked for a better location.”
Crown Point Bakery was an instant hit despite the worries of opening a franchise in a previously untapped location.
“At first the opening of Crown Point was very overwhelming because we were going there like we didn’t know anything because there are no other Twisted Sugars in the Midwest – the closest is in Idaho,” Thompson said. “So we don’t have a partner store telling us, ‘Hey, can you help us? Can you do this?’ So we were kind of thrown into it.
“The first weekend we opened Crown Point, we sold almost 8,000 cookies, so we had to close that following Monday because we didn’t have a single cookie to sell,” Thompson said. “[The Crown Point] community emerged. We were completely blown away, so it was kind of a whirlwind of emotions.
After strong demand from Crown Point, the Valpo site was well prepared to handle its own opening weekend.
“We’ve streamlined a lot of our processes and we feel much more comfortable opening in Valpo. We’re so excited for this, and we know the Valpo campus, students, and community are going to love what we have to offer them,” said Thompson.
Housed on the first floor of West Promenade at 60 University Drive, Twisted Sugar uses its on-campus location to attract students as both a job opportunity and a space to meet and study. Of its current 21 employees, 10 are Valpo students and they are looking to keep hiring more.
“We want students to have an accessible, easy place to work and for them to walk around and relax,” Thompson said. “We specifically chose this place because we wanted students to come with their laptops, with their friends…and just hang out studying, eating a cookie [and] have a drink. »
Continuing its commitment to being community-driven, Twisted Sugar provides fundraising opportunities for local sports teams and other groups, hosting “Dine and Donate” events that donate a certain percentage of profits to the group.
“We don’t want people to be shy about asking us to support their extracurricular activities or even donate baskets to their raffle or things like that,” Thompson said. “As a small business, we want to be able to give back, get involved and build relationships with people, so for me that’s the core of why we’re doing this.”
After the initial success of their pitches, the Thompsons set their sights on the future of Twisted Sugar.
“We have already floated the idea of opening a location in Schererville/Highland…[because] the company’s philosophy is very community-oriented,” said Thompson.
Twisted Sugar is open seven days a week. Its hours of operation are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays, and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on other days.
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