Candy Funhouse, an online retailer of confectionary treats from chocolate bars to gummies and licorice, is hiring for $78,000 a year (C$100,000) work from home director of Candy.
Duties include: “leading candy board meetings, being the head taste tester… and all the fun stuff.”
Several thousand candidates have already applied for the position, which was posted on LInkedIn in July, CEO Jamal Hejazi said. He noted that he’s been surprised by the number of “golden ticket”-themed apps and elaborate videos of entire families offering to share chores and pay.
But Hejazi also sees the attraction. “Imagine your best memories around candy and having that every day at work,” she said.
Based outside Toronto, Candy Funhouse is run by a quartet of siblings in their 20s and 30s who grew up in the area and whose parents owned donut shops and a local restaurant.
“My brother Mo, a candyhead, founded it in 2018 and my mother was employee No. 2,” Hejazi said, adding that he and a younger sister and brother joined the company .
The family hoped to differentiate their company from other wildly successful brick-and-mortar and online competitors like Mars, Hershey and Amazon with a “weird” mix of products, no minimum orders – “we’ll sell one lollipop” – and a strong push in social networks.
Sales in 2021, boosted substantially by the pandemic, were “just under $15 million. I’m not kidding,” Hejazi said.
The family retains 90% of the property.
The company said the candy director position is open to applicants as young as five, although parental permission would likely be required. Many parents have filmed their child filling out the application and posted it online.
The company has 340,000 followers on Instagram and three million on Tik-Tok, including one Kardashian, Hejazi said, though he declined to specify which.
Right now, the company is gearing up for Halloween, its biggest sales period last year. “We have 40% of our shares” so far, Hejazi said. Last week, candy giant Hersheys reported that it will struggle to meet Halloween-related demand this year.
Hejazi also pointed out that reports on social media claiming that the chief candy officer will have to eat 3,500 sweets per month are incorrect. (That number represents the different varieties of the company’s stocks.) “That would be 117 a day,” Hejazi said. “That’s too many.”