Fudge is a pleasing dessert, gift, party food, and delicious snack. Fudge comes in many flavors other than chocolate. There’s peanut butter, rocky road, caramel, maple, and so many more. Whatever your favorite flavor, there’s likely a fudge for you to enjoy. What really makes these flavors special is when they use Wisconsin ingredients to make them.
Linda Schulte, owner of Valley Fudge and Candy in Coon Valley, shares more on how they use Wisconsin butter in their fudge and the process of running a fudge business.
“We always use 100% Westby Creamery butter, which happens to be in the next town over from us,” says Schulte. “That’s what we always use in our fudge and we are proud to support the Wisconsin dairy farmer.”
Valley Fudge and Candy buy their butter wholesale by the 40 pound block because of the quantity they use being so large. Schulte added that the price of the butter took a pretty good jump as did the rest of their supplies. However, they don’t mind because to them they are at least supporting their local dairy farmers.
On average, about 250 pounds of butter comes into their warehouse a week. With the upcoming holiday seasons, this number will increase even more. They are preparing for the holidays by making sure that they have enough packaging on hand as well as what special flavor they will be making.
Schulte adds, “In the fall, we do a caramel apple pie fudge, a pumpkin pie fudge and a pumpkin cream cheese. We love to do cranberry fudge too. So, yes, we’re already thinking about fall, Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up.”
While pricing is always a concern for businesses, they order a lot of things by the pallet which helps them cut back on costs. Valley Fudge and Candy works hard to utilize local products, not just for the fudge but for their packaging as well. A lot of their boxes come from Green Bay Packaging. They had to change the plastic recyclable box that they use for their individual pieces of fudge a few times due to supply chain challenges, but they are consistently watching the markets to see when things are available.
When the pandemic started, it was a concern if people would continue to purchase luxury items such as fudge or stick to their essential grocery lists. However, people continually bought fudge and allowed Schulte’s business to continue to thrive.
They sell their fudge in all 50 states in over a thousand shops. Many times people will be traveling and talk about how they saw their products in a small shop in Montana or even Florida. Schulte says that their niche is small mom and pop shops. They are very proud to be able to sell a product that uses Wisconsin dairy products, helps support the Wisconsin dairy farmer, and highlights Wisconsin’s rich agriculture industry with the rest of the world.
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