Memphis Made: The Story Behind Shotwell Candy Co.

Most businesses start with a business plan. Shotwell Candy Co. started with a copper pot, some sugar, and a lot of very late nights.

In 2012, Jerrod Smith was a corporate attorney in Memphis, Tennessee. By day, he worked the hours that corporate law demands. By night, after his wife and three daughters were asleep, he went to the kitchen and made caramel.

It wasn't a calculated pivot. It was a compulsion. He wanted to make caramel in its best possible form — using real ingredients, real technique, and no shortcuts — and he kept refining the recipe until it was right. That process took months of late nights, batch after batch, adjusting temperatures and ratios and timing until the texture and flavor landed exactly where he wanted them.

The Midnight Kitchen

The routine was simple and relentless. Finish work. Come home. Wait for the house to go quiet. Then start cooking.

Jerrod would begin around 8:30 in the evening and work until one or two in the morning — cooking, cutting, wrapping, and packaging caramels by hand. In the beginning, every piece was cut by hand on the kitchen counter. Every wrapper was folded by hand. Every package was assembled by hand.

Family and friends pitched in as orders grew. When shipments piled up, Shotwell threw what became known as shipping parties — a deliberately festive name for what was essentially an all-hands packaging operation, fueled by the promise of food and company. People showed up. The caramels went out.

It was the kind of operation that only works when the product is genuinely worth the effort. And it was.

Why Memphis

Memphis is not the first city that comes to mind when people think about artisan confectionery. That's part of the point.

Memphis is a city with deep roots in food culture — in barbecue and soul food and the kind of cooking that takes time and doesn't apologize for it. It's a city where craft and quality are recognized and rewarded, where people take what they make seriously.

Shotwell is a Memphis company in the truest sense. The caramels were developed here, refined here, and are still made here. The collaborations that produced the Espresso Caramels and the Craft Beer & Pretzel Caramels were built with local partners — Vice & Virtue Coffee and Ghost River Brewing — because using Memphis ingredients to make Memphis candy was the obvious and right thing to do.

When you order from Shotwell, you're getting something that came from a specific place, made by a specific person, with specific ingredients. That specificity is the opposite of mass production, and it's exactly what makes the product worth seeking out.

The Press Didn't Find Us — The Product Found the Press

Shotwell wasn't built on a marketing campaign. The press coverage came because people who encountered the product wanted to write about it.

Southern Living. Garden & Gun. Magnolia Journal. Real Simple. These aren't publications that cover mediocre candy. They cover things that are genuinely good and worth sharing with their readers. The coverage happened because the caramels earned it.

Gary Vaynerchuk tried them and said so publicly. The Local Palate called them deliciously addictive. Draft Magazine called them gourmet perfection. None of that was manufactured. It was the natural result of a product that does what it claims to do.

What Hasn't Changed

Shotwell is a different operation now than it was in 2012. The shipping parties are mostly a memory. The scale has grown. The products have expanded.

But the things that mattered from the beginning are still the same. The recipes haven't been compromised to cut costs or increase speed. The ingredients are still real — real butter, fresh cream, pure cane sugar. The caramels are still made in small batches, still hand-cut, still hand-wrapped.

And Jerrod is still the person responsible for every batch that goes out. The company he built at midnight in his kitchen is the company that ships to your door today.

The Lesson He's Still Teaching

One of the reasons Jerrod started Shotwell — and one of the reasons he talks openly about the story — is because of his daughters.

He wanted them to see what it looks like to build something from scratch. To work hard at something you believe in, to be patient when growth is slow, to stay true to what you set out to make even when shortcuts are available.

The caramels are the product. The story is the lesson. And the lesson is still going.