From great gifts to candy-making ingredients and supplies, Spindler Confections on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge is a one-stop shop for everything candy.
Photo Credit : Courtesy of Spindler Confections
Whether you’re looking for the perfect gift, needing a quick sugar boost, or simply in the mood to indulge, there’s a Boston candy shop ready to sweeten your day. Beantown has some amazing chocolatiers, too, but for our purposes here we’ve prioritized candy over chocolate. And even though there are some amazing shops in the surrounding towns, we’ve decided to stick pretty close to the urban core. Those caveats aside, here are a few of our picks for the best candy store Boston has to offer.
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Spindler Confections on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge is a one-stop shop for everything candy. Photo Credit : Courtesy of Spindler Confections
Spindler serves up fresh candies, made by hand — and once you try the maple pecan brittle, or the pâte de fruits, or the toasted-coconut fudge, you may not be able to pull yourself away. The shop offers guides and ingredients for those who’d like to try their hand in the kitchen, too. But perhaps the coolest feature of all is the Boston Candy Museum, a collection of 80 or so artifacts that celebrates the area’s candy history, ranging from John Hannon’s 1765 chocolate mill to the 1847 creation of the Necco Wafer production machine to the area’s status as a candy mecca in the 1950s.
No trip through Logan Airport is complete without a stop at this self-serve candy shop, where 400-plus types of candy are at your fingertips. You’ll find a few trail mixes and other semi-health-conscious items here, but the stars of the show are the vintage offerings, from gumdrops and Sugar Daddys to giant lollipops and Abba Zabba taffy bars. While Natalie’s doesn’t carry the gourmet offerings of some of the other shops on this list, the trip down memory lane that it offers is decidedly sweet.
Prefer your candy a bit more upscale? This Prudential Center shop may be just the ticket. Touted as “a luxury candy boutique for grown-ups,” Sugarfina features an international lineup of artisan confections. Champagne gummy bears, “Frooty Loops” breakfast candy, tequila grapefruit sours — Sugarfina will make your head spin, in a good way.
Phillips Candy House has long been among Boston’s premier candy attractions, as evidenced by the vintage postcard, which likely dates to the late 1930s or early 1940s. Photo Credit : Public Domain / Tichnor Brothers Collection of the Boston Public Library
Phillips Sweets was a Belmont sweets shop opened in 1925 by Philip and Concetta Strazzula (the second “L” was included in the shop name to make it more “Yankee-sounding”). In 1952, the next generation of the Strazzula family opened a Morrissey Boulevard shop called Phillips Candy House, which is still going strong even though the Belmont shop closed in 1977. Phillips is known for dedication to quality ingredients, and chocolates do get the spotlight — its signature turtles were named one of Oprah’s “Favorite Things” — but don’t miss the terrific candy lineup, which includes jelly beans, hard candy, fruit slices, taffy, gummy bears, and, of course, Boston baked beans.
Cabot’s got its start as a road show in the 1920s, traveling from fair to fair to sell taffy, before becoming a Provincetown mainstay. Now it’s expanded to Cambridge’s Harvard Square, where it offers more than three dozen flavors of taffy and various kinds of fudge (Oreo cookie, cranberry walnut), as well as creative updates on old favorites, like “beer brittle.” But the Squirrel Nut Zippers are, well, Squirrel Nut Zippers — not everything, after all, can be improved.
What are your favorite Boston candy shops? Let us know!
Associate Editor Joe Bills is Yankee’s fact-checker, query reader and the writer of several recurring departments. When he is not at Yankee, he is the co-owner of Escape Hatch Books in Jaffrey, NH.
