How passions for science and candy led to a sweet business

Clad in a white lab coat, scientist Katie Teh squirts syrupy red liquid into quarter size molds on a large metal tray. Her previous effort led to a product that was too soft. So she altered the formula.

“We're playing a lot with pH,” she said. “Along with making sure there's enough of the gelling agent or the hydrocolloid.”

It’s trial and error in this west Omaha lab. But that’s science. In this case, candy science.

The business is called Sprinkk.

“Sprinkk is a product development lab for candy innovation. We help people take their ideas, create them into a physical product,” said Tessa Porter, the candy scientist and entrepreneur who created Sprinkk.

Clients range from individuals trying to create something from scratch to established candy companies.

“We'll make samples in our lab," Porter said. "We'll tinker with texture or flavor or color until you think it's just right, and then from there we'll scale it up."

As a kid, Porter always had candy nearby. She helped with her dad’s construction business, sometimes pretending the concrete mixer was making jelly beans. And she had a passion for science.

“I think I'm a natural nerd that I've just always been curious about how things work and how to put things together, take things apart,” she said. “I was never really told that STEM isn't an option.”

With a master’s degree in food science and technology, and a decade in the candy industry, Porter returned home to Nebraska to launch her business.

“I started Sprinkk to allow people to create new things, to bring those ideas that they have and allow them to come to life in the candy industry," Porter said.

On any given day, there’s a lot happening inside the Sprinkk lab.

Porter coating malted milk balls with chocolate in a rotating coating machine, kind of like the concrete mixer of her childhood.

Teh looking through a handheld refractometer at a small sample of that syrup for the pre-workout gummies she’s working on.

Karen Talley, Quality and Food Safety manager, using a texture analyzer to simulate chewing. It slowly presses down on a piece of candy to measure firmness and springiness.

There’s a device measuring the amount of water in candy. Lots of beakers and microscopes. People talking about hydrocolloids, spinning protons and relaxation rate.

“I think even food scientists are often surprised at the amount of chemistry that goes into candy,” Porter said.

More syrup is mixing and cooking inside a large metal kettle a couple hours from Omaha in Porter’s hometown of Albion. Here, Sprinkk has a small factory in a building once part of the family construction business, where they test production in small batches.

“This is truly what fills the gap between what we do in the lab and Omaha and full scale manufacturing,” Porter said.

Today, they’re making some of the company's own line of fruit snacks, called Norma’s. It’s a product they sell that also helps Sprinkk test it’s business model. Named for Norma Porter, Tessa’s grandmother, who has a passion for natural wellness and makes syrup from her elderberry trees.

“And as time went on I thought, This would really be nice if we could put this in gummies of some way,’" Norma Porter said.

Tessa Porter took the syrup recipe and transformed it into fruit snacks.

Norma Porter sad working with her granddaughter has been “beautiful.”

“I just never thought that it would possibly ever happen,” she said. “It really has humbled me.”

“I think a lot of my creativity comes from her roots down through that side of the family,” Tessa Porter added.

An open house last summer celebrated Sprinkk’s new Omaha lab. To nobody's surprise, the crowd included Tessa Porter’s family. It’s a big reason she came back and opened her quickly-growing business in her home state. The place where curiosity and some parental patience launched this.

“She's always been a creator,” said Jeni Porter, Tessa’s mom. “So if she wanted candy, she would think, ‘Tootsie Rolls are my favorite things, surely I can make these,’ and so before I would get up in the morning, she would get up to make her mess and try making Tootsie Rolls. And by the time I got up, either it worked or it didn't.”

Yes, science can be messy. Sometimes experiments don’t work. But all the ingredients come together for Tessa Porter.

“If you would've told 10-year-old Tessa that she could be a scientist making gummies for a living and get paid for it, would've never believed it, but it's a dream job," she said.

Watch our "What If..." series story about candy scientist Tessa Porter and Sprinkk: