Treats that remind you of grandma's: How a Utah woman is bringing back butter mints

BEAVER — When Ramona Jessop tastes butter mint candies, she thinks of her grandma. These days, she's helping thousands of people do the same as the owner of Nancy Lou's Butter Mints in Beaver.

"At Thanksgiving, we'd have little mixes with the butter mints in them, and I'd pick out all the mints," Jessop said.

Jessop was raised in Hildale in southern Utah, which is on the Utah-Arizona border in an area known to residents as Short Creek. She grew up cooking in the kitchen with the women who raised her and the siblings and cousins she called friends.

As she grew older, the simple delicacy of a butter mint candy was what brought her back to those good times at family gatherings.

"Nancy Lou is my uncle's wife's grandmother, but in our little community we claimed all the grandmothers," Jessop said. "They're all special and were all such a part of us as girls growing up. Nancy Lou was a caterer in Salt Lake before getting married and moving to Short Creek, and this was her special recipe that she had with her meals. She was really detail-oriented and really elegant in her presentations."

Tasting Nancy Lou's butter mints was not only a treat, but according to Jessop, nobody else had the recipe — that is, until Nancy Lou passed away.

"When she died, my cousin got the recipe," Jessop said. But, even with the recipe in hand, making the famous butter mints was not easy.

"In the beginning, the process is a lot like taffy, but it has a lot of butter in it," Jessop explained. "It's cooked to a little higher temperature, so it's a really hard candy to stretch."

One thing that couldn't be missing from the recipe was love, and Jessop often took that in the literal sense.

"You really had to have good energy when you make butter mints," she said. "If anybody got frustrated, the recipe would just go to sugar, and it wouldn't work. One of my sisters started drawing a heart in the top of the sugar, and now we put a heart in every batch so we stay happy and bring the love to what we make."

{#sugar heart}

Making it a business

Jessop was 17 years old and wanted to turn the candy-making into a business. Her mom worked at a nearby clinic and started bringing the mints to share with coworkers. Soon, the mints were selling "like crazy."

"They all wanted them in their corporate gifts and would give them to their doctor friends," she said. "We were making them in our little back kitchen in a little hallway that was closed off from the rest of the house so that we could keep it clean and organized."

Then the evictions started.

In 2005, a state-managed trust took control of the community's lands from the FLDS church following a federal lawsuit against church leadership. Formal evictions, however, began in the summer of 2015, which was right when Jessop's business started to take off.

"We sold them like crazy for a while there, then we kind of stopped for a few years as we were moved from Short Creek to Cedar City," Jessop recalled. "We didn't really have a place to make them, and the clinic also closed, and a lot of the places we were able to make them for were also closed because of the evictions."

For several years, Jessop and her family bounced around the state and even up into Idaho, just trying to find a place to call home, let alone make mints in. During that time, she wanted to learn more about how to make a business, and so she took classes at Bridgerland College in Logan, which she said really opened her eyes to what she needed to do.

"That made it so we could get all of our certifications and the FDA approvals so we could start selling them in stores," she said.

Her family eventually settled in Beaver a little over two years ago. To make ends meet, Jessop took a job at a local Walmart, as well as a local soap-making company. She also cooked soup for a coffee shop, and somehow found time to hand-make the mints and fulfill orders.

She knew, however, that to better scale the business, she needed to buy some machines.

"They were working really hard," her mom Clea Jessop said. "She was drying all night and putting in long hours and hand stretching and cutting. I remember saying that we would not make one more mint until we got a machine. So, Ramona saved her money she made from the coffee shop and in 2024, she bought machines for this company."

{#hand stretching}

Those machines cost $5,000 each, but Ramona Jessop said they were crucial to growing the business.

"We've sold at least 40,000 packages this year, and we've been in over 100 stores now," Ramona Jessop said, adding that her goal is still the same as it was in the beginning.

"There's been many days where it's like, 'Are we gonna make it, or should we just go find a nine-to-five?'" she said. "It was amazing to see that every time it got that way, we just felt like something would happen that would help us keep going. Heavenly Father's helped us through a lot.

"It was never about me; it was about our grandmothers and our heritage and what really makes us remember who we are," she continued. "I love making butter mints. I just love it."

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