Welcome to the True Treats Experience! The club for discerning, curious and fun-loving folks who love history.

BECOME PART OF THE TRUE TREATS EXPERIENCE!

Coming your way via our email correspondences and social media appearances:

  • Opportunities to be a True Treats taster, whether one of our historic candies, teas or snack foods. We send the sample - you tell us what you think!
  • Contests with hardly any rules and a tasty prize.
  • Interesting, hard-to-find recipes, many undiscovered and primarily made by women at home.
  • An insider’s view of True Treats EXCLUSIVE gift boxes and collections - with first dibs on limited edition products.
  • Unique historic cards, perfect for birthdays, congratulations messages, & more.
  • Links to lost-and-now-found movies, candy ads, photos, and more.
  • PLUS - a special email address for our True Treats Experience friends, so you can contact us about finding hard-to-find recipes, candies that your Grandma loved, and candies, snacks, even drink mixes that you'd like us to carry.

All about True Treats

True Treats is unique. YES! We carry old time and retro candy – but our timeline is older than that! Our sweets, snack foods, teas, and cookbooks span the FIRST in history to the 20th century. True Treats has 500+ products for you to discover, try, and share!! Since Susan Benjamin opened True Treats in 2010, we have been the nation’s ONLY research-based historic sweets, treats and candy store. You can find our products in museum gifts, specialty shops, AND, of course --- on our Web site and at our brick-and-mortar stores. No matter where you find True Treats, you’ll find the product’s story on the label, box, and tag with an historic image to match.

True Treats Chocolate Table Mid-1800s-Mid-1900s

Meet our Founder, Food Historian Susan Benjamin

Susan talking to customers at our Harpers Ferry store
A nationally recognized food historian, Ms. Benjamin, has devoted her time to researching the history of candy, snack foods, teas and treats since 2010. A former academic, cultural researcher, and communications strategist, Ms. Benjamin digs deep into American food culture from kitchens to fields to the frontlines of American history. You may know Ms. Benjamin from one of her many media appearances from the History Channel, PBS, and Vice.com, on radio shows ranging from ABC news to NPR affiliates, or publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or through TV productions such as Jeopardy, which featured her store on one of their questions. As an author, Ms. Benjamin has written ten books which have sold internationally and been translated into five language. Her most recent book, “Sweet as Sin,” was on the Smithsonian’s list of “Best Books about Food.” AND she is working on #11 - due out in 2024! Always - she brings her findings to visitors at her brick-and-mortar and online stores and, as part of the True Treats Experience - TO YOU!
Susan at the Smithsonian with her new book!

The Many Faces of Our True Treats Experience Tasters

Our First Ever Grapefruit-Ade Tasting!!

Funny Face Sour!!
Grapefruit Tasters feedback Better! Thanks to True Treats' Vanilla Sugars
Grapefruit Tasters Grapefruit -Ade with Grapefruit Slices

****LOOKING for the perfect -and perfectly unique- gift? Looking for lost candy? An important recipe? As part of the True Treats’ experience, you get an exclusive connection. Reach us by phone, email, or Facebook and we’ll get right back to you with answers and ideas***

Our 3-Century Candy Collections - 1700s, 1800s, 1900s - 36 Samples and the story of each

CANDY PLUS!!!

We offer other historic experiences such as teas - the origin of medicine which was the origin of.... CANDY: Here are a few of them:

DON'T FORGET!!! Follow us on Social Media - you'll find even MORE there.

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