Stephanie Hart, owner of Brown Sugar Bakery, bought a candy factory and expanded her product line. A lot is going on inside the old Cupid Candies factory in Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Chocolate mixers are whirling and cans of evaporated milk are stacked knee-high. One worker is unwrapping brick-size sticks of butter, and someone is giving a decades-old piece of equipment the "old Fonzie nudge." The most exciting part for Stephanie Hart isn’t the candy: It is the construction. The nearly 70-year-old facility is on its way to a second life, and Hart is giving it breath. Hart, the owner of Brown Sugar Bakery, bought the factory in late 2020 to expand her cake-making operation, which had outgrown its storefront on 75th Street on Chicago’s South Side. Hart took on the candy-making, too, to expand her business and keep some of the longtime workers employed. "This is going to, at minimum, (quadruple) my capacity to make cake," Hart said, standing behind trays of chocolate turtles. "My hope is I’ll be able to grow to meet that capacity." Hart calls this stage "escaping mom and pop" as she takes her business to the next level. Brown Sugar launched online sales […]
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