A Little Somethin’ Sweet
On Detroit’s west side, a family business serves up memories and treats unified by one ingredient: sweet potatoes.
The shop, appropriately called, Sweet Potato Sensations, is owned and operated by the Thomas family. Just in time for Christmas dinner, WDET’s Annamarie Sysling spoke with Cassandra and Espy Thomas about how the business got its start, and what goes into the sweet potato pies they provide to Metro Detroiters around the holidays.
There was a time before sweet potatoes became the family’s livelihood. Cassandra Thomas, the proprietor and self-professed ‘Chief Everything Officer’ of Sweet Potato Sensations, says the idea for the business actually came from a candied yam debate with her husband Jeff.
Cassandra says Jeff loved the sweet potato cookies and the recipe quickly became a household favorite. After getting her family’s stamp of approval, Cassandra took the idea one step further in the summer of 1987.
“We set up a table at a garage sale in Rosedale Park, we had 125 bags of cookies, we had samples and surveys. We really weren’t pushing selling the cookies, we just really wanted people to try the cookie because I said, ‘no one else may like these cookies but us,’ but in less than three hours’ time, we had actually sold all the bags of cookies,” says Thomas.
Nearly 30 years later, from their café on Lahser Road across the street from the Old Redford Theater, Sweet Potato Sensations offers a number of other treats. Cassandra says, soon after the cookies, came the pie. After toying with a few recipes, Cassandra says her aunt suggested she revive her grandmother’s recipe. The traditional sweet potato pie led to the sweet potato coconut pie, the sweet potato pecan pie, sweet potato cheesecake, sweet potato pound cake, cobblers and more.
“We really consider ourselves continuing what Doctor George Washington Carver started. He’s most well-known for what he did with the peanut, but he also made a lot of products from sweet potato. As a matter of fact, the sweet potato ice cream is one of his, and we do sweet potato ice cream too,” says Cassandra Thomas.
Cassandra says she bakes the pies for customers at Sweet Potato Sensations the same way she does for her own family. During the holiday rush, the store can sell up to 1,000 pies a day. Their pies are also sold at approximately 20 other shops and grocery stores throughout Metro Detroit.
Cassandra’s daughter, Espy Thomas, says fresh ingredients and honoring the local community near the shop are two of the most important things to her family’s business.
“We’re just really about the neighborhoods, because the neighborhoods are extremely important and the neighborhoods need beautiful things to happen, and everything that is beautiful is not always Downtown,” says Espy Thomas.
