Omaha's Candy Lab was born in a church kitchen and a spare bedroom.

Tessa Porter, who worked at Ferrara Candy Company in Chicago, where she led research, innovation and creation for brands like Lemonheads and Nars Gummy Clusters, left her job during the pandemic and moved to her hometown of Albion, Nebraska.

For several years, she has been nurturing ideas for a new business that provides development and testing facilities for candy makers and bridges the gap between innovation labs and manufacturing.

Many companies are either too small to have the space to manufacture and refine their candy, or too big and end up spending too much money making test batches in larger factories, causing their concept to ultimately fail.

Porter, who has bachelor's and master's degrees in food science, believed he had the answers to both problems.

She found a few customers and set up shop in her hometown's St. Michael Catholic Church, where she produced, tested and refined gummy candies and other candies.

“I just wanted to be somewhere else for a while,” she said of how she fled Chicago to Albion, “and I ended up staying there for the whole summer.”

Her candy-developing job remained steady even after she moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Papillion.

“I packed the lab into a Rubbermaid tote and set it up in a spare room in my new house,” she says. “I was on client calls and did demos in front of the camera, and they had no idea it was a bedroom.”

Still, she craved a more professional environment, and now she got it.

Porter initially operated out of a temporary commercial space, but recently opened for the first time a completely renovated and fully equipped candy development and testing facility for his two-year-old research and development company, Sprinkk, located at 6686 S. 118th St. No. 101.

The move expanded her retail space to 3,700 square feet and doubled her staff from 2 to 4. She has a list of customers and potential clients, mostly makers of gummy and hard candy, and has even branched out into making her own gummy treats, using recipes passed down from her 90-year-old grandmother.

She also opened a 2,500-square-foot factory in Albion that has small-batch candy-making equipment that wasn't available to manufacturers before. For a large candy company to make a small batch of a candy they're developing, it can cost them about $20,000 in their own equipment, meaning they stand to lose a significant amount of money if it doesn't work in tests, she says. Her factory offers a cheaper option.

Porter said this all happened at just the right time, as the gummy candy market has exploded.

“Jelly Belly is making gummies now,” she said.

Her new candy lab is professional, clean and stocked with items everyone can name, including a large industrial mixer and testing equipment that most people will be unfamiliar with.

When customers bring them ideas, she writes out the candy formula, runs experiments and, if necessary, contracts with process engineers to devise new processes, then makes the product in her Albion facility to see if it's feasible.

“It's a place where customers can get their prescriptions the same day,” Porter said. “It speeds up the innovation process.”

Porter and her lab are equipped to work with all kinds of candy, including chocolate, but she holds an advanced degree in sugar crystallization from the University of Wisconsin and specializes in gummy and hard candy technology.

She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she worked in the Food Processing Center lab making Beatrice (Nebraska) Bakery's famous fruitcake, a holiday staple for people across the country, and interned for two years at Hershey's, working on the Reese's brand.

Candy's career as a scientist and innovator was almost inevitable, she says.

First, she loves candy, especially gummy bears, Tootsie Rolls, and chocolate covered almonds.

Another reason, she said, is that she's always been interested in food.

“[As a kid]I would try to make edible cheese tape to seal burritos. I had a notebook and I wrote all my notes down in there,” she said.

She gave it her all, but eventually moved on to bigger things.

“I've officially given up. I'm not going to make edible tapes,” she said.

Her mother, Jeni Porter of Albion, said other earlier projects were more successful.

“When she was in middle school, she made chocolate purses,” her mother said, “some of them opened so you could put things inside.”

Her daughter is putting that background, including early experimentation, to good use in a side business she's just started with her grandmother, Norma Porter.

Porter was known for his homemade elderberry-ginger syrup, and when his granddaughter wondered if she could use it to make some candy, Tessa agreed, and now they use the syrup to make gummy candies at their factory, which they sell.

They also plan to branch out into new flavors, such as strawberry rhubarb, which Tessa recently planted in Albion, about 2 hours and 15 minutes northwest of Omaha.

She's also working on a few projects related to Sprinkle. The factory can produce limited edition products that companies can use in their marketing. One recent example was beer-flavored mints made for a national brewery and distributed for “Dry Jamwary,” a campaign encouraging people to abstain from alcohol for a month.

“It was very bizarre,” Porter said.

She also began giving demonstrations and talks to students after her niece asked her to speak to her elementary school class, who were reading a book about jelly bean engineers.

That got her thinking about creating Sprinkk-branded candy kits that parents and teachers could make with their kids.

Jenni Porter said that matches her daughter's drive and enthusiasm, and while the family is happy she's returning to Nebraska, they didn't always understand the implications of her chosen career.

“I don't think we realised the gravity of what she was trying to do. She didn't tell us all her intentions so we weren't worried or scared to begin with,” Jeni said. “We had no idea there was a candy scientist thing going on.”

She also said people, including those in the candy industry, have told her they are amazed that Tessa has made it so far in the business – others have tried and failed, they said.

But she is confident in her daughter's abilities.

“She was always an inventive kid, a creative kid, always a determined kid,” Jeni says. “She was like, 'I'm going to do this, get out of my way.'”