If you're ever driving through Cleveland, Ohio and spot a mural with a giant lollipop in front of a warehouse, you should see what's inside. Aisles upon aisles of jelly beans, Pez dispensers, chocolate bars, hard candies, taffies, and other treats cover more than 40,000 square feet at the b.a. Sweetie Candy Company. Boxes are sometimes stacked all the way up to the 22-foot ceiling. Store owner Tom Scheiman said in a 2023 interview with Out N About Columbus that the emporium may be the largest in the world — and it's definitely the biggest in North America. "Pretty much, if it's being manufactured today, we've got it, and we've got it in huge quantities," he said.

The business sells more than 5,500 types of candy, from modern favorites like Airheads and M&M's to old-school candies that defined generations. In all, you'll find about 600,000 pounds of confections for sale, which is equivalent to nearly $5 million in inventory. That's enough to satisfy an entire town's sweet tooth.

b.a. Sweetie is more than just a candy store, though. The facility also includes a soda shoppe with more than 200 varieties of sugary drinks and an ice cream parlor, as well as a popcorn kitchen. Beside the store, families can play a couple rounds of putt-putt on two candy-themed mini golf courses. It's not only the best candy store in the state of Ohio (if you ask us), but with 500,000 visitors a year, it's a "not-to-be-missed attraction," according to the company's website.

Who runs b.a. Sweetie Candy Company?

As "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" taught us, it takes a visionary to run a chocolate-coated kingdom. For the b.a. Sweetie Candy Company, that's Tom Scheiman. He and his wife Judi purchased the Bag A Sweet Candy Company wholesale business in 1982 and opened b.a. Sweetie, a 40,000-square-foot Cleveland candy emporium, in 2015. It combines Scheiman's retail and wholesale business, which distributes popular candy bars and other sweets to more than 1,000 locations.

A big fan of nostalgic treats, Scheiman told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer in 2019 that his favorite is a Chunky bar, a Nestlé throwback (now produced by Ferrero) that features a milk chocolate shell containing peanuts and raisins. (It even made our list of best old-school Halloween treats.)

Scheiman's company also owns a Sweeties Candy location in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, and just like the Ohio location, it's big. The 13,000-square-foot store is the largest in Arizona and is managed by Scheiman's daughter and son-in-law. In 2025, the b.a. Sweetie Candy Company celebrated its 75th anniversary, as the original Bag A Sweet Candy Company began with brothers-in-law bagging treats in a basement in 1950. But the company undoubtedly owes the past 40 years of success to Scheiman, who's a member of the Candy Hall of Fame.