Still Here: The Story of AATreats LLC

My mom, DeAnna, had been married nearly thirty years when my dad died from health complications. Overnight she was raising twins alone. She was working as a social worker, which meant she spent her days taking care of other families, then came home to figure out how to keep ours afloat. There wasn't much work around, and there was even less in savings.

So she bought a few candy machines. Not because she dreamed of vending, because she needed something she could build between home visits and school pickups. She called it AATreats LLC. She filled them at night, counted quarters on the kitchen table, and put both of her kids through school with that money.

It worked, until October 2018.

Hurricane Michael came through as a Category 5 and it didn't just take roofs. It took the stores that housed her machines, the routes she'd spent years building, the whole infrastructure of the town we knew. We were blessed to be alive. My mom packed us up and drove us to California because there was nothing left to drive to here.

Two years later COVID shut the world down. The jobs she'd found disappeared. The big city buzz that was supposed to be opportunity just felt heavy, with no family support and two kids growing up fast. When the pandemic softened, she made the call again. She hauled us back across the country to Florida, back to a calmer way of life.

By then I wasn't a kid anymore. I was a young adult with a business mind and something to prove. We reopened AATreats together. No big launch, just flea market stalls on Saturday mornings, a mini storefront that barely fit a table, and a small group of customers who remembered us and told their friends. New products, same idea: little treats that make an ordinary day a little better.

Then last October, in 2025, Mom fell down the back steps at her day job. Her femur broke in half. Emergency surgery left her with a titanium rod in her leg and a long recovery that isn't finished. Because of complications she will use a rollator or a cane for the rest of her life.

That changed everything and it changed nothing.

The woman who used to lift fifty pound boxes of candy now runs the numbers from a chair and tells me when a display looks wrong. I work multiple jobs, I'm learning how to be her caregiver, and I'm running the day to day of the business we rebuilt. We argue, we laugh, we restock late at night after the markets close.

When you buy from us, you're not just getting a gift for yourself or someone else. You're buying the hours a single mom spent after her social work shifts. You're buying the restart after a hurricane, after a pandemic, after a cross country move, after a fall that took her mobility but not her will.

We are not a big company. We are a family in Panama City that keeps choosing to show up for each other and for our community. That is the whole business plan, and it's why we're still here.

— DeAnna & Alyssa, AATreats LLC