Hey, all! It’s Ben.

I have to come clean to you and my Italian relatives. After getting smoked in a cannoli-eating contest over the weekend during Omaha’s Santa Lucia Festival, I didn’t think I could stomach anything to do with sweets. But seeing that my fellow SPN reporter Lev Gringauz wrote about an Omaha-based candy startup garnering both attention and star power, I decided I could at least learn more about these dessert developers from Nebraska. I’m glad I did.

Sweet Stash brings together a mix of interesting characters. Twin brothers Adeev and Ezra Potash are celebrated musicians, TV personalities and Omaha natives. They co-founded Sweet Stash with actor and comedian Martin Starr. If that doesn’t grab your attention, they leaned on the support of local candy scientist Tessa Porter and her candy development startup also based in Omaha, Sprinkk. 

“We’d already tasted this candy in our heads,” Ezra Potash said. “We had to now download that onto somebody that could make it exactly to the specs that we created.”

From reimagining candy ingredients and flavors to fine-tuning operations at Sprinkk’s manufacturing facility in Albion, the Sweet Stash team has launched a product appearing in hundreds of locations throughout the Midwest.

Read the story on SPN to discover some interesting insights to chew on.