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HARLINGEN — Candy! Candy! Candy Galore! You’ll find it all here in the Candy Shop store!
Want raspas with watermelon and coconut and pineapple? Swing by SAB’s and sample some more! How about a sour patch watermelon raspa or one called a lifesaver or paradise or a piccadilly bomb.
Stepping into SAB’s Candy Shop at 918 N. 77 Sunshine Strip is like entering a tiny portal to a fantasy world of playful colors and flavors and smells of sweetness and timeless joys. Walls are covered with eye-catching murals in playful colors, one of which reads, “Official Home of the Gusherlicious” which kind of launched Candy Shop into the spotlight of people in big places.
It all started when a precocious 13-year-old girl named Samantha Ponce wanted to help her parents.
“I thought of selling candy out of my living room or a yard sale, and that’s where we got the name Candy Shop,” said Samantha, now 23 and in Houston to open a second store.
It quickly became a family affair with her brothers Adam and Bryon joining in and thus “SAB” — Samantha, Adam, Bryon — became part of the Candy Shop’s name.
“We were there doing candy, selling popsicles, hot Cheetos and cheese there for my neighborhood,” she said. “I saved up and bought a sno-cone machine. I started learning how to make my own syrups and creating anything I could with the sno-cones, something different. My creations, they just came out of my head. I would be looking at candy, seeing if I could create something like it, like sour patch watermelon.”
She and her brothers continued with their creations and experimentation and long labors. Strangely, the young Samantha came under attack by those much lesser than herself – classmates bullied her for doing something they found “embarrassing.”
It is a strange quirk of human nature that often the innovators and the inventors and the creators of things fine and beautiful and new come under fire by the average and the mediocre who feel intimidated by those greater than themselves.
But through it all they persevered, and when Samantha came up with the idea of the “Gusherlicious” people took notice.
You can call it a raspa, but it is so much more than that.
It is a delight to the eyes, this colorful raspa with layers of flavor. A Tik Tok video shows shaved ice rushing into a plastic cup, then dosed with strawberry flavor, then another layer of shaved ice followed by pineapple flowing over the ice, then more shaved ice and the process is repeated with lime and coconut and topped with Gushers candy and Gushers juice. Gushers are a chewy fruit candy snack.
And that’s when she started getting calls and messages and all of them positive.
“I got noticed online on Twitter, so Gushers reached out to me while I was in my living room, asking me questions like where am I located, how do I create things,” she said. “And of course I was responding to them in excitement like, ‘OMG, I can’t believe you guys reached out to me.’ And they were discussing my collaborating with them, and I said, ‘Yes of course’ and they started sending me merchandise.”
She was 17 years old at the time; as soon as she turned 18, she and the family moved to the current location. The experimentation and the creations create a somewhat carnival atmosphere. Customers can find chamoy pickles covered with red sauce. Sabroso chile paste, chile Skittles and chile Airhead extremes.
But it’s grown beyond sweets. Ten years after a young girl started selling candy raspas out her house, her business now has a diversified product line which now includes burgers and fries and so many things nice.
It was Taco Tuesday at SAB’s and her mother Brenda Ponce was at the counter serving customers.
“Hi, welcome!” she said to a woman approaching the counter.
“Do you have pickles?” the woman asked.
“No, we have diced pickles,” Brenda Ponce answered.
After more conversation the woman ordered nine tacos for a dollar a piece. The range of tacos reflected the broad imagination of Samantha and the rest of her family: the lengua taco, bistek taco and chicken taco.
It goes without saying, that somehow SAB’s has found a way to make these tacos different from anyone else’s tacos in this everchanging awesome world.
Tuesday afternoon, Samantha was already selling raspas in front of a Houston school on a hot afternoon.
