Sweet Success

A drive for reinvention and engagement has turned local rainmaker Greg Cohen into a vintage candy guru with global appeal

If the guy making Victorian-style hard candy on your social media channel looks familiar, your eyes aren’t fooling you. Greg Cohen, owner and mastermind behind Lofty Pursuits—an ever-evolving Market Street retail shop—has become something of a sensation with nearly 600,000 subscribers to the YouTube channel, where he leads viewers down a rabbit hole where history, science, and invention intersect.

The “citizen scientist and candymaker” (as his business card reads) directs, narrates, and often stars in videos, manipulating molten sugar on equipment that dates from the 1880s, using top-notch flavorings and nearly lost-to-history techniques. 

“Mass manufacturers can’t do what we do,” Cohen says brazenly. “They’re working on tiny margins, and I’m using the best quality ingredients I can find and making it all by hand.”

His busiest season is Christmas when his staff is inundated with orders for handmade candy canes flavored with high-quality peppermint oil that costs Cohen $130 a pint, while bigger operations settle for oil that goes for $6 a pint. 

“It means I’m charging more for hard candy than anyone ever has in the history of mankind,” Cohen blusters, though his website has candies starting at $5.99 for 2.75-ounce package and $7.99 for two individually packaged candy canes. He believes that the taste of his confections is worth the price.

Spring brings a plethora of fruit in the constantly evolving lineup of flavors that include strawberry, citrus, watermelon, cherry, and banana, each with an image of the fruit in the candy’s center. Sours, especially tangerine, are popular—Cohen tinkered with the recipe until they replicated a long-discontinued Altoids variety. His most attention-grabbing candies are the “crystal flower” series. 

“We made crystal-clear pieces of candy with 3D flowers in the center,” says Cohen, who took his inspiration from his cousin’s Washington State lavender farm. “This is one-of-a-kind magic because clear is very unforgiving.”

All hard candy starts clear. As it’s folded and rolled on a water-cooled table, air bubbles form, quickly turning the confection white. The crystal demonstrations online prompted orders from as far away as New Zealand,including those for custom designs. Cohen says he has limited slots for custom orders because the process is time- and cost- prohibitive, but “we always give priority to people in Tallahassee,” he says.

Interestingly, increasing orders wasn’t the reason Cohen got into candy making.  

Lofty Pursuits sells general-interest toys, but when it launched in 1993, it was an outgrowth of a mail-order business that sprung from a teenage hobby of juggling, which he picked up when his family moved to Orlando, Florida from Brooklyn, New York. “I didn’t have a driver’s license, and there was nothing to do,” says Cohen, who came to Tallahassee for college. Juggling led to involvement in yo-yo competitions and selling all manner of skilled toys such as juggling equipment, yo-yos, kites, Frisbees. 

“Then along came Amazon, and the world changed,” says Cohen, who was unable to compete, so he shifted his inventory and added an old-fashioned-style soda fountain to bring in customers, as well as a locally sourced breakfast menu. All that was missing was a reason for patrons to linger. 

Cohen, who leans into nostalgia and a desire to get his hands dirty, decided he needed some kind of entertainment in the shop and stumbled across antique candy-making equipment and someone to show him the ropes. Before long, his entertainment, which he dubs “Public Displays of Confection,” kept customers in the store as they watched the construction of the sweet treats. It also draws new customers, diverting interstate travelers who’ve encountered a YouTube video into Tallahassee.

What’s the next pursuit for this lofty-thinking businessman? Time will tell, but he hints about studying chocolate making. “The cocoa industry has a big problem right now,” he says, referencing how changing climates are influencing the regions where cocoa grows. “If I’m going to do it, I’m going to start with the beans.”

Sounds like a next act in the making.  

Lofty Pursuits 

Located at 1355 Market Street, Suite A11.
For more information, call (850) 521-0091
or visit pd.net or loftypursuits.com.