Growing up, Heidi Grace Pagano would always go to fairs and horse shows with her family, but never ate fair food. “My mother always packed a healthy picnic lunch for us from the garden instead,” she says. “I especially wasn’t allowed to have the cotton candy because my mother said it would rot my teeth. It was never a part of my palate as a child.” So when her husband Phil Pagano, owner of Uncle Phil’s Organic Popcorn Shop & General Store, came home one day with the giant cotton candy machine he claimed he got a good deal on, she was a bit confounded.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN

A shameless sweet toother may have immediately jumped for joy at the prospect of making homemade cotton candy after dinner. But Heidi admitted her initial reaction veered more toward “Why did you get this?” and “What are we going to do with it?” Being a food-service worker at Pine View School for more than a decade, finding healthy food options and snack alternatives for not only herself and her family, but also for the students, has always been a priority. 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN

But when her daughter mentioned such a thing as dye-free, additive-free cotton candy, Heidi was intrigued and jumped online to research it. “I spent a lot of time finding an organic cotton candy source,” she says. “It was really exciting when I found a source in Hawaii.” Upon finding a lady named Dana with her own organic cotton candy business, Spun Paradise Cotton Candy Company, Heidi gave her a call. “I learned she had started making her own because her kids had food dye allergies but didn’t want them to feel deprived from other kids eating it. She figured out how to use natural sugars, real fruit and natural food flavorings.” Heidi’s jaded perception of the classic candied confection dissipated. And having always had a strong love for Hawaiian culture—with the abundance of farming, tropical fruit, roadside mom-and-pop-shops, a close connection to Mother Nature, their sense of community—it felt like a sign to bring a little Hawaii Gulf side. “She told me she did wholesale sugars, so I was able to buy directly from her.” 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY WYATT KOSTYGAN

Now that she knew she could exclusively mess around with the real stuff, Heidi started experimental test trials: mixing, heating, liquefying and rapidly cooling the outsourced sugarcane and organic dextrose into Phil’s salvaged cotton candy maker. Her affinity for island life led her to brand the creation of Big Wave Cotton Candy. “The swirling of the cotton reminded me of a big wave forming.” Handspun centrifugally into a mass of fluffy fairy floss, the fine strands create a childlike urge to grab and pull off into bite-size finger holds for a melt-in-your-mouth snack.

Big Wave is available in eight island-inspired flavors—Lychee, Coconut, Mango, Lilikoi, Watermelon, Pineapple, Sea Salt Caramel and Banana.Customers can find containers of the old-school sweet treat, parlayed with clean ingredients and still kid-approved, in Uncle Phil’s General Store. The local popcorn barn and cotton candy shack nestled in the Rosemary District is a homey neighborhood market, a meeting place for the community and a resource for hyper-local goods. SRQ

Catch the wave at Big Wave Cotton Candy, 1316 North East Ave., Sarasota, 941-504-1077, @bigwavecottoncandy.