Carol Lester, owner of Sugar and Spice, arranges items on a shelf in her Colchester store.

Sugar and spice

By: Crystal Lindell

Posted: 9/29/04

Carol Lester likes to make apple pies, especially with pie and pastry flour, which is not available in most grocery stores so she decided to create her own bulk food store, Sugar and Spice in Colchester. After 30 years of factory work she took a voluntary lay-off from Haeger Lamp and opened the business.

"I wanted a change and I've never, ever regretted it," Lester said.

The short wooden shelves of the store are filled with apple butter, potatoes, lemon drops, sprinkles and whole-wheat baking products.

"I have one customer who swears by the whole-wheat on losing weight," she said. "She's lost over 100 pounds since the first of the year."

Sugar and Spice also sells over 90 different spices. Lester said one woman drives all the way from Springfield to buy Saffron, a Spanish spice used for rice and soups, from the store. The store also sells crystallized ginger.

"I don't like it, but there's people out there who do," Lester said.

The store has soy candles for sale on a table by the register. Lester said she wanted to keep the business as local as possible, so she called the Colchester FFA and asked it to make soy candles for her to sell and she would then pass along the profits. However, the members said they would be unable to keep up with that type of demand, so Lester found a mother-daughter team in Macomb to make them.

After traveling about 90 miles to find similar stores for her own needs, Lester realized the hole in the local market.

"I had seen stores like this run by Mennonites or the Amish in Iowa," she said.

Three years ago she read an article in a cooking magazine about a woman who had a bulk food store, so she looked up the woman and gave her a call. She was hoping the owner would be able to tell her how to start up her own similar business.

"I called the woman and told her I had some vacation time coming up and that I wanted to come see her store," Lester said. "She said I could come see her store, but she wouldn't help me. She said 'no one helped me and I won't help you.'"

Lester said the store was about 300 miles away, so she wouldn't have been in competition with it. Because the woman was unwilling to help her, she never did go visit it.

Lester then found a bulk store about 90 miles from Colchester in Cantrell, Iowa, and the man who owned that store helped her. She said he told her about a catalog that had all the items that she would want to sell.

"I took the small business start-up class at Western (Illinois University)," Lester said. She also added that she had to take a refresher course for her health food service license.

Her husband bought her the building as a gift.

"It was sitting empty for a long time," she said. "I really wanted to use an existing building rather than building something."

When they bought the building, the floors were leaking. She and her husband hired the local Amish community to help them build the floors and make some shelves. The store finally opened on Jan. 1, 2003.

"I had nothing to do but sit at home and watch football, and I said 'we're going to open today,'" Lester said.

Originally the store was open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week, but it is now closed on Sundays.

"I found it just doesn't pay to be open on Sundays," Lester said.

Lester's daughter and three grandchildren help out, but she said she pretty much runs things. She added her grandchildren participate by picking out types of candy she will sell.

Currently they have gummy spiders, gummy chicken feet and year-round multi-flavored candy canes, among other candies.

"The store offers something really different from your Wal-Mart or Kmart experience," Lester said. "Those stores are OK, but every town has those."

Some of Lester's customers buy baking products in her store and then share the results with her.

"People bring me things," she said. "They're always buying (ingredients) and then bringing me a loaf of bread."

Lester does not sell her own homemade food at the store though.

"That's a whole other can of worms with the health department," she said.