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Business & Tech

Sweets Booth Gives Smith Haven Mall a Homemade Touch

The Scrumptious Treat Company in Lake Grove gets back to basics with its candied fare.

At the end of a row of kiosks in the Smith Haven Mall is a pink-and-white-striped booth that stands out from the modern mall scene around it.

“I wanted it to be old-fashioned. I didn’t want it to blend in with everybody else,” said Deborah Dufton, owner of Scrumptious Treat Company.

Dufton sells organic cotton candy, popcorn and various other sweet treats from the booth, which she built with her husband in April. She said the business has developed a loyal following among employees at the mall’s stores and passing shoppers.

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“It tastes better. It tastes like it was supposed to taste 100 years ago,” Dufton said of the cotton candy, which she likened to the flavor of a crème brûlée’s burnt caramel top.

She has two types of cotton candy, white and pink, calling the pink “99 percent organic” because of the coloring she uses in it. She said the popcorn is extremely popular, with a distinct sweet corn taste accented with only salt.

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The sweets station started as a booth at the East End GreenFest in Mattituck, an annual festival celebrating local organic products which Dufton helped organize for the past two years. Her five children wanted to host a booth there, so they dreamed up a candy stand in the all-natural spirit of the festival.

A representative of Simon Malls, which owns Smith Haven Mall, approached Dufton about setting up there permanently, she said. She was skeptical at first, unsure of how the “hip outdoor feeling” of her organic treats booth would translate to an indoor mall setting, but she said long lines and customer reactions have proven the novelty to be transplantable.

One woman tried Dufton’s fudge and bought the whole tray, then kept in touch.

“She got ahold of my cell phone number and bought the whole tray every time I made it,” she said.

Dufton said she no longer offers fudge but does make an interesting assortment of other sweets, including candy-dipped marshmallows and caramel apples. Dufton said she aims to do something a little different each week.

Everything is made on-site at the booth, which was itself made by Dufton, her husband and their five children in April. They started with a cabinet they bought at Lowe’s Home Improvement and built the rest around it.

Dufton takes pride in her old-fashioned method of producing organic “things you can’t get anywhere else,” using only fresh ingredients. She said the venture has been so successful that she is in the process of opening booths at several other malls and possibly one of the area’s airports.

Dufton has five employees but mans the booth herself on weekends, usually along with some help from a select one or two of her children, who take turns going. She called the work “low stress” compared to her experience organizing festivals.

“Everyone’s happy when they come to you, and happy when they leave,” Dufton said. “What’s better than that?”

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