How a personal trainer landed a sweet gig
Candy has made her so busy her, day job has become a side hustle
There’s a question Geisha Chin gets asked a lot as a personal trainer and it has nothing to do with exercise.
It usually comes after Chin talks about her other job. She’s a candy maker.
“So you’re a personal trainer but you make candy?” Chin said with a laugh. “I’ve always had a sweet tooth and my sweet tooth is so bad. If I had to choose between eating food and eating candy, I’m going to eat candy.”
To some, that might seem ironic. To others, it makes Chin, owner and operator of Lua Candy, an online confectionery specializing in alcohol-infused and regular lollipops and chocolate, a dream fitness instructor.
Except candy making has made her so busy that her day job at the gym has become her side hustle and turning lollies and chocolate bars decked out with every imaginable flourish has become a full-time job.
That wasn’t always the plan. In fact, making candy for a bit of extra income was never her intention, either.
Melting sugar and decking it out with all the fixings was meant to provide solace after her marriage ended about two years ago. Chin’s new reality was as a single mom to her then six-week-old son Mateo. Both her heart and her infant boy needed care.
“I was just really devastated and had just had a baby so had crazy hormones,” Chin recalled. “I was just so sad and I needed to find happiness.”
She found it in her kitchen, teaching herself how to make sweet treats. Her first few batches of alcohol-infused lollipops were a disaster as she learned the idiosyncrasies of the medium. A pot may have caught on fire in the process.
Still, it was as much a creative outlet as a healing one, and she was determined to make it work. The first time a batch of lollipops turned out, she was propelled by the sweet success.
Chin took inspiration from handmade soaps she saw on Pinterest, making translucent lollies filled with colourful candy bits that made them showstoppers to look at and to eat.
In the eyes of family and friends, Chin’s was an endeavour in which they saw serious business potential. Eventually she did, too.
“When I was making these lollipops and I popped them out of the mould, it was like ‘Ooh, they’re so pretty,’” she said. “After all the drama of my divorce, I thought ‘Let me try creating an Instagram account and see what happens.’”
After moving to Welland by way of Calgary last February, Chin took Lua Candy out of her home kitchen and into Commis Culinary Work Space, a professional kitchen and food business incubator in St. Catharines.
It’s where you could find her as often as four days a week, cranking Beyoncé and losing herself in the process of creating treats for an ever-growing customer base.
Every week, the list of orders for her candy sold on luacandy.com grew. Requests for her bubble gum lollipops, the peach bellini or guava cosmo versions, and her bestselling moringa pistachio chocolate bars meant making a decision about trading personal training for personal fulfilment. The latter won out.
In addition to online orders shipped or hand-delivered in Niagara, Lua Candy is available at Bushel and Peck in St. Catharines, and sold wholesale elsewhere in Canada. Chin also does custom orders for bridal parties and other functions.
This week, Chin is opening Café Lua, the bricks and mortar incarnation of her business, on Jarvis Street in Fort Erie. It will be a family affair with her sister Eva working as head baker, adding cupcakes and cheesecakes to the Lua repertoire. Her brother Nick will be head cookie maker. There will be coffee to go, too. And of course the candy that started it all, which is also still sold online.
“That’s what we’re starting with and then expanding. Everything will be small-batch. We’re not mass producing anything,” Chin said. “We want everything to be a sweet haven.”