[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES Dwain Hebda and Jade Graves Photography “][/title]
One look at Grayson Clayton’s six-year-old face and you immediately see what sensory overload looks like. He’s just come into Kopper Kettle Candies’ original Van Buren showroom with his caregiver, the rough equivalent to walking into a life-sized kaleidoscope. Teresa Tankersley, third generation of family ownership and management, greets the lad, helps him narrow things down a tic and offers him a sample half the size of a playing card. One bite and he offers enthusiastic approval.
It’s impossible to tell how many Graysons have come through the doors over the years, but the reaction of such tots over this real-life Candy Land never gets old for the proprietors.
“It’s the people, that’s what I like most, getting to see everyone,” says Berry Ann Greer, co-owner. “The best part of it is, you get to see a lot of familiar folks and you get to meet a lot of new people, too. The worst part is you can’t remember everybody’s name right then.”
It doesn’t matter how old you are – or where you’re from or how dour the weather may be, as it is on this mud-speckled February day – walking across the threshold of Kopper Kettle is like stepping backward for decades. Tray after tray and row upon row of fresh, perfectly formed treats wink at you from behind the glass, strident towers of gold-boxed collections await the ride home and the air hangs heavy and sweet with the smell of chocolate.
And as if that weren’t enough, a simple laser-printed sign promises the annual run of chocolate-covered strawberries will arrive soon. If that sounds like something other than the great news it is, you haven’t experienced the milk chocolate-dipped flavor bombs for yourself.
“Mother and Dad had done that one time, but they have a real short shelf life so my dad wasn’t interested in continuing that,” says Tommy Greer, whose parents opened this shop in 1956. “We have some friends in Memphis who own Dinstuhl’s Fine Candies which has been over there one hundred-plus years. They were doing the strawberries and we got to talking about it.”
“Mr. Dinstuhl had somebody go get us some strawberries and we made some real quick. We decided then that we were going to do it.”
The experiment started by producing three hundred berries per day, dipped on Thursdays and Fridays. Tommy remembers taking unsold stock to police stations and media outlets to keep them from going to waste.
“We did that for a few years,” he says. “Now, we’re doing 3,500 to 4,000 a day.”
Even in those quantities, the berries are still produced just two days a week (Thursday and Friday), two months out of the year (April and May). Timing is everything in the Greer’s business, hard-earned knowledge they have honed to know the perfect size of berries for dipping in a proprietary milk chocolate sauce and calibrating their time window to match the berries’ degree of ripeness. That’s why they get their fruit from California; local berries tend to be too small and ripen too late for their needs. All of that knowledge combines for a treat fans can’t seem to get enough of.
“I remember we had a lady that came in here, maybe the third year we did them,” Berry Ann says. “She got her a little box and she went and ate one and it was like she just melted down that wall. She said, ‘Whenever I eat these things, I just turn into a pillow of mush. My legs won’t support me, they’re so good.’”
Tommy has been around this shop for most of his life and nearly all of his and Berry Ann’s married life. His father, Martin, learned the tricks of the trade back in Texarkana, Texas, and had come to this spot in 1956 with Tommy’s mother Betty to stake his claim on confectionary. Like all family-run outfits, that meant all hands on deck to help the company succeed. And succeed it did, with a reputation for quality and taste that built a foundation of loyal locals and a steady stream of highway travelers. However, the hours were long and the work was hard and by the time he graduated high school, Tommy had had enough. He joined the Navy to chart his own course in life.
“Working here, it was just necessity. You didn’t have any choice,” he says. “When I got out of school and got into the Navy, I never wanted to see another candy store again. Got out of the service, went to Houston and Berry Ann and I met and got married in Houston with no intentions of ever coming back up here.”
He shakes his head in wouldn’t-you-know-it fashion, adding, “So, couple years later, we were here.”
Fate, it seems, had a sweet tooth and when Tommy’s father died in 1978, he pulled up stakes and pitched in to help his mother keep things going. Despite its long tenure, Kopper Kettle was far from a sure-fire thing, having suffered greatly by the then-six-year-old interstate siphoning off traffic from Highway 64-71.
“Well, as you can see out front, this is a roadside business and the interstate bypassed Mother and Dad in ‘72. Right over there about half a mile,” he says. “So that changed all of their business. When we decided to make a go of this, we knew we’d have to have a store in Fort Smith. So, we opened the store in Fort Smith in 1980 or ‘81 and we’ve had one there ever since.”
There was no real secret to bringing the company out of those lean years, just simple hard work and a refusal by Tommy and Berry Ann to fall by the wayside. The couple dutifully cranked out the company’s signature handmade Turtle clusters, peanut brittle, divinity and Ozarkies, a concoction consisting of vanilla cream center surrounded by milk and dark chocolate and pecans that goes back to the 1950s.
But they also started introducing new flavors and concepts, such as Tommy Truffles, the delectable bite-sized creations that greet the visitor as they walk in the front door. Today, the Greers roll out a new flavor every twelve to eighteen months, on average.
“Some changes are inevitable,” Berry Ann says. “If they do away with a flavoring, if you can’t find it, you can’t make it. Some of those things are out of our control.”
“Chocolate is another thing,” Tommy adds. “Used to be I don’t know how many chocolate manufacturers were in the United States. Now we’re down to about four. Some of those don’t want to sell you chocolate unless you’re buying a trailer load at a time. The most we ever buy at a time is about two thousand pounds.”
A quick spin around the place is like a history lesson in candy making. Some of the equipment dates back to the 1940s and 1950s and includes one conveyor-driven machine that’s a dead ringer for the one Lucille Ball famously worked over in her original comedy series. Here and there, the candy-making vats and contraptions have name plates on them, christened after longtime employees.
People tend to spend many years here, but no one works forever and in the last couple of years, three workers with a combined half-century of experience have stepped to the sidelines. That doesn’t faze the Greers much, seeing as how they’ve been able to steadily add family members to the operation including Teresa, her daughter and son-in-law. Tommy and Berry Ann’s son Thomas, a successful restauranteur in Fayetteville, pitches in as needed. But, as Tommy says, changing times still take some adjustment.
“It’s very difficult,” Tommy says with a shrug. “You’ve got to learn to step aside sometimes, keep your mouth shut and let somebody else do something.”
As for that next wave of Greers, Teresa says she and the other family members not only feel the responsibility of living up to a family legacy but to continue an Arkansas institution.
“Mom and Daddy made the business what it is,” she says. “My grandfather and grandmother started it but my parents made it what it is. It makes me feel very proud. I grew up here,; my grandparents lived in the back, so I was always around here.”
“My intent is to keep it all going. Seeing what Mom and Daddy have worked so hard at, just to carry it on and continue and be something my kids can be proud of. That’s what I want to do. This is our heritage.”
Kopper Kettle Candies
6300 Alma Highway
Van Buren
479.474.6077
Fort Smith Location:
Green Pointe Center
Fort Smith
479.783.8158
Order online and be sure and call for pick-up and delivery options!
Kopperkettlecandies.com
