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About Zeke's Candy Company
As told by Founder, Sheila Cotton
I’ll start right out by telling you this is truly a love story. My husband, Jeff, and I love good food, colorful friends, the great outdoors, music and merrymaking, as well as each other and for the past twenty-two years our candy business has brought all those elements together.
When we met in Reno, NV in 1981, I was selling real estate and Jeff had just come “off the road” from working as a sound engineer with rock n’ roll bands such as The Jefferson Starship and The Grateful Dead. We fell in love right away and spent the next four years exploring the mountains and deserts whenever we could get a few days off from my real estate business and his audio engineering work. By 1985 we decided it was time to get married and move up on the mountain we loved, Mount Rose. We bought a house at Sky Tavern (on the Mt. Rose Highway) that we later found out had the highest elevation (7680‘) address in Reno. We snowshoed a half mile up a steep hill to get to our house in the winter and hiked the mountain in our backyard in the summer. Those were glorious days, demanding our energy but giving us lots of time to dream up crazy ideas.
Each year at Christmas time I would cook up my family’s butterscotch candy recipe and give it to my friends and clients. I created the packaging and labels calling it Uncle Zeke’s Butterscotch. Jeff enthusiastically decided to make his version of his Grandma’s Kix cereal cookies as well and he playfully named them Dog Doo Souveniers.
We had a blast cooking and packaging the goodies and were told many times over that we should “go into business”. By 1988, I decided it was time to give it a shot with the butterscotch. I knew what I wanted the packaging to look like and also knew that once people tasted the candy, they’d have to have it. So I made up a mockup of the gift can I thought would sell, filled it with butterscotch pieces and went to local specialty food and gift shops. Every buyer I met with agreed to start with a one case order.
I was in business! But wait a minute, I needed a permitted commercial kitchen to make the candy legally. Well we had gotten to know our new neighbors down the hill who had purchased the Mt Rose Tavern, a fine mountain eatery that was closed two days a week. They agreed to rent the kitchen to me two days a week to cook my candy.
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About Zeke's Candy Company
As told by Founder, Sheila Cotton
But wait another minute. I still needed to get my Uncle Zeke’s permission to use his name and image.. You see, this was an old family recipe although it was was my grandmother, Lena Worcester, aka Old Wooss, who found the recipe in a cookbook published in Chicago in the 1850s. It became a family recipe when her grown children each carried on her tradition of making it on special occassions and each one tweaked the recipe a bit to make it their own. They would then get together for these special days along with their families and my cousins and I would play while the adults argued about butterscotch. How silly, I thought, it’s all good. Can I have another piece, pleeeeeease?!
So what to name this authentic family recipe that I wanted to market commercially? My uncles and aunt all possessed a dry New England sense of humor along with a good dose of self confidence. Any of them would be a good “mascot” but Uncle Zeke won out and agreed to go along with whatever fame might come to him.
That first season I cooked, packaged, sold and delivered $5,000 worth of candy during the Christmas season but I was a partner in a Century 21 Real Estate office that still demanded most of my time. Jeff was busy working his audio engineering magic at the Reno Peppermill Casino cabaret on the graveyard shift. Still, we spent our time off from work to visit all the little towns around Lake Tahoe and up and down the Sierra, sampling our candy to shop owners and setting up displays for those who liked the idea of selling a locally made candy.
Interest had grown and by the time we were looking at another holiday season, I knew I needed help. Well Jeff said he’d rather be my candy cook than work in a cabaret until 6:00am and that’s how our partnership in the business started. It turns out I really needed someone with his skills and creativity ‘cause this is where things started to get really interesting.
To be continued......
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