Aplets & Cotlets Candy Kitchen

The Liberty Orchards store stands at 117 Mission Avenue in downtown Cashmere, at the corner the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation gives as Aplets Way and Mission. The shelves hold Pacific Northwest gifts and boxes of fruit-and-nut candy. Among them stands the stove on which, the company says, its first candies were cooked. Samples come fresh from the factory floor. A guided tour of what the Cascade Loop listing calls the “old world kitchen” leaves the store every twenty minutes. It follows the candy, in the company’s words, “from hand sorted walnuts to hand packed boxes.”

The factory keeps its own hours. Visit Wenatchee lists weekday tours from 9:30 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. On weekends there is no production, and from 10:30 to 3 the tours show the machines only. The Cascade Loop listing warns that the line may be idle when a visitor arrives. In 2016 the company’s website reported 80,000 visitors a year on the tour.

Kettle, forms, and cooler

The company’s own posts describe what the tour shows when the kettles are running. Workers pour the candy out of the cooking kettle to add the nuts, and the steam carries the smell of fruit concentrate across the room. A batch of Orange & Almond in June 2026 smelled, the company’s writer posted, “as if I had wandered into an orange grove.” A run of Blueberry Pomegranate & Almond Orchard Bars left the factory smelling of blueberries. A 2014 Wenatchee World photograph shows Sal Lanuza emptying hot mix into forms during a tour. The mix sits a day in the forms, 24 hours in the cooler by the company’s account, before it is cut. In 1997 the New York Times described “the sweet-smelling country store out front” and “the white-hatted, smiling factory workers in the back.”

Aplets are apple and walnut; Cotlets are apricot and walnut. The line has since grown to include Fruit Delights, Dessert Delights, Berry Delights, Fruitlets, Orchard Bars, and a Turkish Delight assortment with Rose & Pistachio and Orange Blossom & Almond. Greg Taylor, who ran the company for more than four decades, told Northwest Public Broadcasting that the candy is a little less chewy than traditional locoum. He told NPR in 2017 that the company added pectin to keep it from going stringy and cut back the rose: “We got too many negative comments about the flowery taste.”

From a Seattle YMCA to Liberty Orchards

According to HistoryLink, Armen Tertsagian came to Seattle in 1906 from his native Armenia. He lived at the downtown YMCA and sold rugs from a shop at 1118 Third Avenue. The company’s account has him emigrating from Turkey and working his way west from Ellis Island. Mark Balaban, born in Turkey, reached Seattle around 1913. Taylor told NPR the two met at the YMCA, where they were likely “the only Armenian guys within 100 miles.” Their first ventures, an Armenian restaurant and the Elzem Company, a yogurt dairy, both failed. In 1914 Balaban’s sister Elizabeth joined him in Seattle and married Tertsagian. She “got sent over to be the wife of my grandfather,” Taylor said.

HistoryLink’s history of the town says the partners disliked the gray, damp Puget Sound climate. In 1915 they bought an apple orchard in the Cashmere Valley on the Wenatchee River. The company says the dry rolling hills, water, and sunshine reminded them of the old country, and that they named the farm Liberty Orchards in honor of their new home. To use surplus fruit they started Northwest Evaporating, a drying works whose output helped feed American troops in World War I. A jam called Applum followed, then a cannery, which HistoryLink says was their main business through the 1930s and 1940s. In August 1931 Balaban joined a Cashmere attorney, J. Harold Anderson, and the Chamber of Commerce in helping John Harmelt, the last hereditary Wenatchi chief, stage a “Pow Wow and Historical Indian Pageant” at the mouth of Yaksum Canyon.

The candy came from the same surplus. The company dates it to 1918, when the partners worked on the kitchen stove at a locoum flavored with apples, the sweet of their childhood. HistoryLink puts the idea sometime around 1920, in their home kitchens. The company’s story continues that they took the candy to local picnics, that a nearby fruit stand began selling it, and that demand spread to the next towns. They formed the candy company in 1920, and Tertsagian traveled the Pacific Northwest selling “the Confection of the Fairies.”

Fairies in the Seattle Times

On February 23, 1921, an Augustine & Kyer grocery advertisement in The Seattle Times listed canned salmon, New York cheese, milk macaroni, and breakfast brownies. It also listed Aplets, “A new confection, made in Cashmere, from the finest Washington apples and honey and walnuts.” Early boxes carried a watercolor of white-clad, winged fairies carrying squares of sugar-dusted candy to a blond girl among flowers. A half-pound box read, “Made in nature’s chosen apple orchard country – the famous Wenatchee Valley – Washington state.” Cotlets followed a few years later. A photograph from the 1920s shows the pioneer Ezra Meeker at the factory, where the company says he stopped for samples.

Sugar rationing in World War II cut production, and HistoryLink says the candies were made only sporadically. After the war the partners sold the cannery and turned to confections. They also sold the orchards, Taylor said, because farm-raised apples did not give the quality control a shelf-stable candy required. Aplets & Cotlets were sold at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and named the official candy of Spokane’s Expo ‘74. For years, because of the old enmity between Armenians and Turks, the company kept quiet about the candy’s kinship to Turkish delight. “At some point we decided, heck, we make Turkish delight and let’s not be afraid to say it,” Taylor said. “Some of the older Armenians weren’t happy that we’d done that.”

The founders’ nephew, John Chakirian, became president in 1969. In 1978 he moved to chairman, and Taylor, a grandson of Tertsagian, became president.

The street called Aplets Way

In September 1997 word went around Cashmere, a town of 2,500, that the candymaker might move to a Bavarian-theme town nearby unless the city met a list of demands. The company wanted official road signs and city letterhead to read “Cashmere, Home of Aplets and Cotlets.” It wanted the town’s two main streets renamed Aplets Avenue and Cotlets Avenue, and it asked to buy City Hall, which stood next to the factory. “There’s got to be a quid pro quo,” Taylor told the Times. “This is the first time we’ve asked for anything, and we don’t think it’s a lot.” Susan Kidd, who owned an art gallery in town, said, “They have asked us to sell out this town.” Jym Reyna, a tavern owner, offered his own version of the sign: “Next Exit -- Cashmere, Home of the Rendezvous Tavern.”

The council granted half. It changed the city slogan and the name of one main street. In 2021 Northwest Public Broadcasting reported “a street in Cashmere named for the long-time company: Aplets Way and Cotlets Way.”

Closing day, and a buyer from Tomsk

On March 16, 2021, Taylor announced that Liberty Orchards would close June 1, after 101 years. The company had employed between 25 and 120 people. “They’ve got deep pockets, and they’ve got the ability to control shelf space and the number of facings they get,” he said of the large confectioners. “And we just can’t compete with that.” In late May a buyer appeared: KDV Group, a confectioner based in Tomsk, in southern Siberia. On June 22 it announced that Aplets & Cotlets would go on being made in Cashmere, with the factory tours and the store at 117 Mission kept open. Taylor retired. He told the Capital Press he was “really delighted that we’ve found somebody who wants to keep the business operating, keep it in Cashmere, keep the employees and keep making the same recipes.”