Sweet success: Now there's one-stop online shopping for kosher candy

Published by THE JEWISH CHRONICLE, DECEMBER 2014

Finding kosher candy online just got a whole lot easier, thanks to the efforts of Temple Sinai member and longtime candy man Jon Prince and his crew at McKeesport-based CandyFavorites.com. After receiving repeated inquiries from customers regarding the kosher status of his various confections, Prince, the president of CandyFa­vorites.com, decided it was time to make things simpler by adding a kosher section to his website.  

After months of research, CandyFa­vorites.com identified close to 700 of its candies as certified kosher.  "For years, we would get repeated questions about whether our products were kosher," Prince said. "We would en­courage people to go the manufacturers' sites to find out. Then it occurred to me to take this up a notch. The shortest point between two distances is a straight line."

It was a lot of work to search through the company's 3,000 different products, identify the ones that were certified kosher and then scan all their hechshers and add them to the products' online de­scriptions, said Jonah Half, the company's marketing direc­tor, who headed up the project.  

"It was one of the biggest un­dertakings I've had," Half said, "but I've had a lot of satisfaction from it. I believe  we have the largest dedicated kosher candy section on the Web right now. It took some time, but I think it was worthwhile."

The web-site had al­ready pro­vided op­tions for customers to search for candy by col­or, brand, flavor and even decade. Now, not only can patrons search for kosher options, but they also can refine their search fur­ther by clicking on "dairy" or "pareve."

"We try to slice the pie down to the thinnest slice," Prince said. "Someone looking for candy for a bar mitzvah buf­fet that is retro, and blue and white, can now break it down to kosher, too."

CandyFavorites.com launched in 1998 as an outgrowth of the McKeesport Can­dy Company, which was founded by Prince's grandfather, Ernest Prince, in 1927 and has been recognized as one of the oldest wholesale candy companies in the country.

The kosher market, Prince said, is "un­derserved in many respects. Why should people who keep kosher have to work harder? There are tons of kosher candies out there, but if they're not designated, how would you know?"

Prince said he hops to add a Passover line of candy to his offerings next year.

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