You might think that a store called Carol’s Quality Sweets sells candy, and you’d be right. But that’s only part of the equation.
From the minute you walk into her small, candy-coloured store, the unmistakable aroma of sweetness greets you. But that’s not all that’s in the air, or on the shelves.
As owner Carol Logan says (smiling sweetly, of course), “We sell memories.”
Carol grew up in Edmonton, and fell in love with candy thanks to regular visits to an old city store called The Palace of Sweets. As an adult, she and her husband Grant made chocolate and fudge as a hobby. Their real chocolate treats were a hit at various craft fairs, so they decided to go full-time into the sweets business. Carol’s Quality Sweets opened its original Whyte Avenue location in 1990 “with two cabinets of chocolates, six jars of candy, coffee and pastry.”
You can get coffee and pastry anywhere, but it’s not easy to find chocolates made with real, pure Belgium chocolate, so they went all-in on the chocolates and candy. But on March 13, 2003, a fire destroyed the store, wiping out everything but half of a cookbook.
Undaunted, by October they had re-established the business at their 1,000 sq. ft. High Street location. Chocolate making is done at a separate factory run by Grant, a trained chocolatier who uses his own recipes, utilizing only chocolate from Belgium and flavours from France or Italy. The result is chocolate unlike anything most of us are accustomed to. “Our chocolates are not the North American grainy, creamy, sugary centres. They’re very, very smooth,” says Carol.
