Inside Sarris Candies’ new factory store, nearly everything is splashed in the company’s signature red and pink.

Twisting red shelves are stacked with chocolate bars, pecanettes (turtles) and peanut butter meltaways alongside penny candy and Sarris merchandise. Red vinyl artwork featuring chocolate-covered pretzels and Sarris mascots Franky Twist and Coco the Chocolate Bar covers the walls.

But the store’s centerpiece is a wooden tree sculpture with red and pink branches curving toward the ceiling — exactly as President and CEO Bill Sarris envisioned.

“Give me a building and a tree, and I was happy,” Sarris said.

“Find your sweet spot,” the tree invites visitors in wavy script.

The new Sarris store, at 135 Meadow Lane in Canonsburg, will open to the public Monday, with guided factory tours debuting July 6. Tours can be booked online starting Monday.

When tours begin, it will mark the first time in the Sarris’ 66-year history that visitors have been invited behind the curtain to watch production.

“They’re going to get to see state-of-the-art chocolate making, which you normally don’t see,” said Jamie Sarris on Friday. “Normally, you only see the end product when you walk in the store.”

Tours will begin at the back of the store, where visitors line up beside a sculpture of Sarris chocolate-covered pretzels. A red half-spiral staircase, wrapped by a winding chocolate branch, leads to a mezzanine overlooking Sarris’ 17,000-square-foot production space. Three television monitors will show educational videos about the chocolate-making process.

“Everything’s done right in this room, start to finish,” said Lisa Puccio, assistant store manager and soon-to-be tour guide, pointing out the room’s 15 enrober machines that can coat any item in Sarris chocolate.

A legacy room highlights the family-owned chocolate company’s history and “bean-to-bar process” before leading into a party room overlooking Sarris’ candy kitchen. The space will soon host events like wine and chocolate tastings and be available for birthday parties, meetings and wedding showers.

Below, visitors can watch cream and caramel centers being made before they’re carted to the production floor.

And, of course, there will be samples.

Puccio started at Sarris in its packing department eight years ago, moving from sales to shipping to working at the store on 511 Adams Ave. in Canonsburg — with its famed 1,500-pound chocolate castle — which remains open.

Her experience makes her a natural to lead three 45-minute tours daily, shepherding groups of 15 through the factory.

“I’ve been everywhere,” she said. “I’m pretty good at explaining what goes on in each department, so that helps me out.”

Both the store opening and the guided tour were five years in the making for Sarris, which purchased the 130,0000-square-foot industrial building on Meadow Lane, formerly home to the Fort Pitt Bridge Works, in August 2021.

Bill Sarris said he’d long imagined a Sarris Candies factory store and a tour that would invite customers behind the scenes.

“We wanted to do something for the community, and bring people in that have never been here — never been to Canonsburg, never been to Washington County,” he said.

In consultation with Sarris’ factory employees, the production room and kitchen were constructed beginning in 2023. The factory store was built around them, with windows offering visitors a glimpse inside. Chocolate production officially began in August 2024, while work continued on the retail store and tour.

“It’s all coming together, and everybody’s emotional,” Puccio said.

While the general public won’t have direct access to the factory floor, Sarris employees said they’re largely ready for life in a fishbowl.

On Friday, confectionery chef Shawn Holsen, two weeks away from retirement, oversaw the 90-minute caramel-making process in the candy kitchen, which employees call “Shawn’s kitchen.”

After being hired in 1988 and trained by Sarris Candies founder Frank Sarris, Holsen has spent nearly four decades at the company.

“I’ve been watching the kettle spin around for 38 years,” he said. “It was going to be a little side job, and then one thing led to another.”

“For so long, it was just him, and he had all the recipes in his head,” said marketing coordinator Chelsea Sammel of Holsen. “So when he announced his retirement, it was like, ‘Oh no, we need them written down.’”

Each batch of Sarris caramel is cooked to 242 degrees in a copper kettle, some of which date to the company’s earliest days, before being poured onto marble tables to cool overnight.

After nearly 40 years, Holsen prefers the same copper thermometer — “it could very easily be 100 years old,” he said — and a 3-footlong wooden spoon pulled from a wall lined with oversized stirrers and spatulas.

The following day, the caramel is cut into smaller squares by hand. The pieces are fed through a slicing machine to reach their finished sizes, then placed individually on a conveyor belt by hand. Some even get a pinch of hand-sprinkled salt.

“Most people are shocked at the fact that we still do a bunch of things the old-fashioned way, the way that people do them in small candy kitchens, mom-and-pop shops,” Holsen said. “That’s how usually the best quality of candy is made, so that’s why we stick with it.”

As the curtain is pulled back, it becomes clear that Sarris remains a family operation. On Friday, Bill Sarris’ grandson, Landen Simms, worked on the production floor. Simms is also working toward master’s degree in mechanical engineering, preparing for what could be a future running production.

Asked what he thinks visitors might learn from the new tour, Simms didn’t hesitate.

“How hard everybody works,” he said.

Bill and Jamie Sarris stopped by the candy kitchen before heading to the warehouse with Bill’s “Velcro dog,” a black-and-white Cavapoo named JuJu Schuster, after the former Pittsburgh Steelers receiver. JuJu inspected a 20-foot-tall inflatable box of chocolate-covered pretzels that will soon stand outside the store.

Tino Rionda, Sarris Candies’ executive vice president and husband of Candace Sarris, Bill and Jamie Sarris’ daughter, proudly showed off the inflatable box, including a carefully crafted “blemish” in the chocolate. Employees said repeatedly that what visitors see on the tour is a snapshot of a typical day.

“It’s awesome just to be able to let our customers come in here and see what we do every day,” Rionda said. “I hope everybody loves it as much as we love it.”

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