Editor's Note: Continuing Meet Me Mondays! I am Britta Malsch, the Purchasing Manager at Anderson's Candy Shop and I also help the Andersons with the social media duties. As I enter my 10th year at the store, one of my goals has been to help introduce our family of staff to our family of customers. I hope you enjoy this series which will highlight the wonderful men and women who work hard to create the Anderson's Candy that you love! The second in our series is Colleen Vineyard.
Colleen has been a part of Anderson's Candy Shop for more than 32 years and has worked with three generations of Andersons (Raynold & Violet, Leif, Tracy & Lars and now Katie, Zach, Ethan and Aaron)! Colleen works in the dipping room. She is extremely accomplished at the art and science of hand dipping. She creates hundreds of chocolate pieces and candy bars each week. Her work is beautiful, uniform and fast!
The first thing Colleen remembers doing at the candy shop was watching other employees dip - moving puddles of chocolate around the marble, warming up and cooling down the chocolate so it would hold a mark on the pieces.
"If you liked playing in the mud as a kid and making mud pies, you might like dipping candy," she jokes. "Smells better and the taste is so much better!"
Something Colleen thinks would surprise customers about the candy shop is that after more than 100 years in business, all of the candy is still handmade. Not cooked or enrobed by machine, and that it's been made the same way since 1919.
She can remember before she worked for the candy shop, she also thought the candy was produced and consumed always all on the same day - more in the style of a donut shop or restaurant.
"Being a customer once and young, I thought everything was made the same day it was sold and when they ran out they closed."
She thought this because many years ago, during Christmas season, the shop would close periodically unless you were a customer coming to pick up a previously placed order.
A few more fun tidbits about Colleen include:
- She prefers milk chocolate unless the center is peppermint, coconut or raspberry mallow, then she prefers dark chocolate!
- Some of Colleen's fondest memories include training others to dip.
"When you have a willing person that is eager to learn and not assuming they know or are doing it right when not," she explains "Everyone looks at us dipping and thinks it's easy because we make it look that way, when it isn't. I take pride in my work and I want them to do well and succeed."
Colleen was taught by Anderson's Employee Hall of Fame member Anita Miller.
"I have had the honor of taking her place and I take that roll very serious. If she saw me doing something wrong all she would say is "what are you doing", and I would totally stop and say "what?" and proceed telling her and she'd correct me. I wanted to be the best and good at it and worked hard to be. Met great people and are still friends with many that have moved on."
Colleen doesn't care for the stress of any of the shop's major busy holiday seasons but she loves doing what she does and always does her best. Colleen does enjoy the last day of each holiday season, when the long hours end and she earns her pay!
On her days off Colleen like gardening flowers and might try a few veggies next year.
She likes to swim at her sister's, relax on her patio or porch in the morning with coffee, bird watching, going out to lunch or dinner with friends. She also enjoys crafty things like wood painting, flower arranging, wreaths, drawing, some reading, puzzles, sudoku, some gambling and being around good people. She loves animals and spending time with her kids, their ladies and her husband.
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