Elegantly dressed Valentine’s Day sweets fill the storefront of Minonk Chocolate Company’s 3,200 sq. ft. building on Chestnut Street. Valentine’s Day, however, is not the busiest season for owners Christie Ruestman and Cindy Meyer. From early September through October, the sisters order an average of 1,400 bushels of apples from Michigan to keep up with the demand for their best sellers, caramel apples. (Photo by Holly Eitenmiller / for Chronicle Media)

Christie Ruestman said she’d get a job when her youngest started kindergarten, and her husband, Randy, held her to that promise.

So, in 1993, Ruestman and her sister, Cindy Meyer bought some equipment, a book and a name —Cunningham’s Candies.

Duane and Ivanelle Cunningham sold the sisters the recipe book they’d purchased from the Paloumpis family in 1976; a book the family brought when they immigrated to Minonk from Greece in the early 1900s.

With book in hand, the Paloumpises founded Minonk’s Princess Sweet Shop in 1915.

“A year before our last one started kindergarten we bought the 101-year-old recipe book and a handful of equipment,” Ruestman said. “Our dad said we were crazy, but our husbands had good jobs and benefits, and that made all the difference.”

Ruestman and Meyer set up shop in a 3,200-square-foot building on Walnut Street that year and began making and selling candies and chocolates seasonally, from September through Easter, as they still do.

In 2015, Cunningham’s Candies moved across the way to an 18,000-square-foot building on Chestnut Street, and changed the business name to Minonk Chocolate Company.

Debbie DeMay drizzles a strip of melted chocolate over each freshly-coated fudge square that Penny Fuller first loads on the conveyor belt. Called an enrobing machine, the chocolates continue past DeMay to an enclosed, refrigerated belt, then packaged. Before Minonk Chocolate Company owners acquired the enrober, all chocolates were made one at a time. (Photo by Holly Eitenmiller / for Chronicle Media)

The new building features a store front and host’s the company’s recent purchase of an enrober; a long series of conveyor belts that move diced filling through a shower of melted chocolate and into a refrigeration process.  Wide windows in the store allow customers to view the enrober and watch as employees make chocolates.

Before the enrober, chocolates were assembled one at a time. Now the candies move along by the hundreds, and the sisters order chocolate by the ton, from a distributor in Chicago, buying only the best quality chocolate.

A romantic holiday would seem a logical hot spot for candy sales, but in the years Ruestman and Meyer have been in the sweets business, it turns out that Valentine’s Day is not the busiest holiday for them.

“The first year, we made Valentine’s Day candies. We made all these chocolates and had them ready, and then they just sat there,” Ruestman. “Then all these people showed up the day of. That’s when we learned that a lot of people wait until the last minute to shop for Valentine’s Day, particularly men.”

Minonk Chocolate Company owners Christie Ruestman and Cindy Meyer recently changed the company’s name from Cunningham’s Candies. Founded in 1915 by Greek immigrants, the Paloumpis family, the Princess Sweet Shop was later owned by the Cunningham family until the sisters purchased the now century-old Paloumpis recipe book. (Photo by Holly Eitenmiller / for Chronicle Media)

Instead of Valentine’s chocolates, it’s apples which are the top seller for the sisters. Each year, the two and a crew of 12 seasonal employees caramel coat an average of 1,400 bushels of apples between the beginning of September and Halloween.

“During apple season, we sell them within about 150-mile radius, to grocery stores, gift shops and at high school football games,” Ruestman said.

Of course, there also are the sundry other homemade chocolates and candies for sale; peanut brittle, milk chocolate berries, chocolate turtles, toffees, malt balls, sweet tarts, Gummie bears.

Chocolate-covered strawberries are made to order during Valentine’s Day, and a variety of chocolate molds enable them to make holiday features, such as a Thanksgiving cornucopia full of miniature chocolate fruits and vegetables.

Minonk Chocolate Company owner Christy Reustman drives a forklift loaded with Michigan apples into the company’s store room. From September through Halloween, she and her sister, Cindy Meyer, caramel coat around 30 tons of apples to be sold at local stores, gift shops and high school football games. (Photo by Holly Eitenmiller / for Chronicle Media)

In addition to the Chestnut Street store front, the sisters also maintain an active Facebook page and currently host the Cunningham’s Candies website, but orders are still either made in person or by phone.

Meyer said their children, who mostly grew up in the chocolate making business, have urged the sisters to “get with the times” and launch an Internet store.

“We like to talk to our customers, we find out about their lives, their families, their babies,” Ruestman said, adding that, though they both appreciate growth, it’s not the money that moves them, it’s the relationships with employees and customers.

“I’m rich,” Ruestman said. “I’m rich because I have food on the table, shoes on my feet, healthy kids.”

— Sisters keep century old Minonk shop a sweet stop —