Sarah Souther
Sarah Souther’s life changed after she ate a marshmallow. (OK, maybe some really good red wine is to blame, too.) While out drinking with friends at the now-defunct Arnold Myint restaurant Cha Chah, Souther was craving something sweet, so she and her friends skipped dinner and went straight for dessert.
“There was a handmade marshmallow on the dessert plate,” she recalls. “I just thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever put in my mouth. I thought it was amazing, amazing, amazing. I went home and dabbled on the internet, looked for some recipes, and I made some.”
Souther, who moved to Nashville from Ireland in the mid-Aughts, was working several jobs at the time — teaching yoga, serving as an assistant to producer Buddy Miller, doing freelance PR and marketing, and being a mom. She had zero culinary experience and zero time for another project to juggle. Still, whether it was the wine or the extra-large dose of sugar on an empty stomach, she couldn’t get that marshmallow out of her head. So she kept experimenting.
“I don’t really love doing anything that’s too plain, I like to add a little bit of spin on it,” Souther says. “So I made a rose cardamom [marshmallow], and some friends tried it the next day, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, these are great.’ I was like, ‘What if we dip them in chocolate?’ ”
Delicious, obviously. And when her friends began demanding her homemade marshmallows for birthdays in lieu of cake, Souther knew she was onto something special. The Bang Candy Company was founded a few months later — she rented a commercial kitchen in East Nashville and began fulfilling her first wholesale orders for Fido — and within a year, after building up a fan base by selling her sugar puffs at the Nashville Farmers’ Market and through the Bang Candy Cocoa Van (haha, get it?), she opened her own shop next to Antique Archaeology, owned by her pal Mike Wolfe, in Marathon Village.
“I didn’t have any plan at all,” Souther says, laughing. “I was just like, ‘Oh, marshmallows are yummy! This is really fun. This is creative and I can make all these different flavors, and people are liking them and giving me money for them.’ It was all those things that spurred me on — that and the ridiculousness of making money out of marshmallows.”
Bang Candy’s been a staple at Marathon Village for about five years now — they were one of the first retail shops in the space. But it’s hard to make rent by peddling $1 marshmallows, so Souther’s product line has grown, partly out of necessity, and partly because she kept discovering inspiring ingredients to mess around with. One of Bang’s most popular items, Sparkle Bark, was created on such a whim.
“I discovered you could buy bulk containers of popping candy — unflavored popping candies — and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s amazing. What can I do with it?’ It’s water-soluble, so I can’t put it in marshmallows — it’s got to be oil-based. I was like, ‘Chocolate!’ Then I found this beet powder that’s a natural food color, and we could make [white chocolate] pink. Then I found the sparkles, [which were] so exciting. I was like, ‘I’m going to call it Sparkle Bark!’ ”
She pauses to laugh. “I’m really just a 10-year-old at heart.”
Now you can find Bang Candy’s marshmallows and shimmering chocolate bark packaged in gorgeous glittery cans in stores nationwide, including Whole Foods and Barney’s. The Bang menu has grown to include honeycomb candy, caramels, fudge, cookies, meringues and s’mores kits, and if you stop by the shop they’ll make you a soda or latte using one of their made-in-house syrups in flavors like peach basil, strawberry rhubarb or pineapple jalapeño cilantro. They’ve also started toasting s’mores to order, which fills the shop with the intoxicating scent of caramelizing sugar (pair that with the smell of toasting almonds and you may never want to leave). They have soft-serve ice cream in the summer, too.
For first-time tourists, the shop is a revelation, a colorful, glittery wonderland filled with tempting confections, but if you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed it’s been a while since Bang Candy released anything new. For years it felt like Bang’s creations were everywhere, with a new product every few months, whether they were partnering with Third Man Records to make a limited-edition can of cotton candy or peppermint bark or introducing a new seasonal marshmallow flavor. But lately, that hasn’t been the case.
Souther admits she’s had a bit of dry spell for the past year or so — “You can’t always be turning out new ideas, I guess” — but the shop’s finally released a new treat, just in time for Valentine’s Day. They’re called Love Bites — small squares of milk or dark chocolate, crispy rice cereal, almonds and dried cherries — and they might be the best Bang Candy invention yet.
The bright burst of tart cherry pairs wonderfully with the rich chocolate, and the crispiness of the cereal provides a delightful light crunch. They’re not a heavy truffle or solid chocolate bar like so many Valentine’s Day confections, where indulgence is goal No. 1. And as Bang Candy is wont to do, it delivers a surprise inside the Love Bites.
When I put the container of the crunchy treats on the snack desk at the Scene offices, my co-workers flocked to try them — “These are pretty good” was the general consensus, tinged with just a bit of indifference. Pause. Pause. “Wait, this is weird!” It isn’t until the chocolate starts to melt away that your mouth begins to buzz — Bang’s signature tiny popping candies dissolve, tickling your tongue and cheeks and leaving your mouth just a bit tingly, the way your brain feels after a really good kiss.
Love Bites are just the beginning of Souther’s renewed inspiration — Rainbow Bark should be in stores in time for Nashville’s Pride Week in June, and surely there’s more to come after that. Souther’s learned that to stay afloat in the candy business, she’s got to keep trying new things, creating goods with long shelf lives that can be sold at wholesale while also anticipating what people will want to buy in Bang’s retail store.
“We’re doing great, but, you know, we’ve got nothing over $25,” she says. “Here at the shop, we break even. We’re not losing money, but we’re not really making money. We’re selling one-dollar-a-piece marshmallows. It’s tricky.
“There’s so much competition, [and] everybody’s attention span is about this low,” she continues, motioning toward the floor. “I try to cater to what I enjoy doing, rather than what the Nashville food scene wants, because, I mean, you could be trying all sorts of different things. You just have to do what you want to do.”
