Edward is 20 years old and he has never had a job. Unlike most of his peers, he didn’t work Saturday shifts in restaurants or grocery stores as a teenager, but also unlike most of his peers, he graduated high school $20,000 (£15,900) richer than when he started. A rounded face with thick eyebrows sits under a neatly combed quiff of jet black hair, his appearance slightly mismatched with his deep, baritone voice. You wouldn’t know, looking at him, that he runs a cartel.

Across the internet, there are thousands of gurus promising to help you get rich quick. Their videos are emblazoned with bold captions about “ONE SIMPLE TRICK” – in reassuring tones they discuss money-making tactics before encouraging their followers to pay for further advice. Edward is one of these entrepreneurs, except the advice he shares with his 30,000 Instagram and YouTube followers isn’t about stocks and shares. It’s about sweets.

Every school has an Edward. Like countless kids for decades before him, Edward earned money at school by selling sweets, crisps, and junk food to his classmates in Tucson, Arizona. It’s an age-old phenomenon – once a year without fail, the British tabloids will run a story about a teenager who made thousands running an undercover sweet shop. Now, thanks to the internet, these kids no longer operate independently.

Edward runs what he calls the #CandyCartel. He is, you could argue, a candy-selling influencer. Although he has graduated and thus no longer sells sweets at school, he shares archive footage with his YouTube subscribers, who are predominantly boys aged between 13 and 18 years old. His most popular videos are titled things like: “How To Approach People When Selling Candy at School”, “How to Pack Your Bag for Selling Candy at School! (3 Ways)” and “5 Mistakes All Candy Sellers MUST Avoid!”. He makes between $250 and $300 a month in AdSense revenue, and also sells an online course with one-on-one tutoring for $59.

“One of the biggest issues that comes up is facing their own fears about approaching people,” Edward explains of his clients. “I try to help them by giving them a script, a few lines to start taking action and approaching classmates that they usually don’t talk to… They want to sell more candy, but they can’t if nobody knows that they sell.”

Why did Edward start selling candy? His answer is simple and obvious: for money. But why has he continued his career past graduation, and begun sharing tips and tricks online? Why do youngsters pay for his advice, and does it really work? And how have candy-selling kids been affected by the Covid-19 crisis, which has shut schools across the globe?

Edward wasn’t the first teenager to try and go viral with candy selling tips. If you Google “How to sell candy at school”, the top result, featured in Google’s answer box, is a video with nearly two million views from a YouTuber called KenyonKen. However KenyonKen no longer makes candy-selling videos (Edward says he has spoken with him and the pair are good friends). At the present moment, Edward is undeniably the Candy King of YouTube – other creators make one-off videos about selling candy, while Edward dedicates his entire online presence to the topic.

Edward is well-equipped to give advice – he began selling candy aged ten (although only fully developed his operation in high school). It started in fifth grade (year six, for Brits) when Edward bought a gumball machine to class and sold pieces of gum for a dime (roughly eight pence) each. “It did get me hooked,” Edward says. “I kept trying new products, new snacks, year after year throughout my school life.”

Through trial and error, Edward came to realise that spicy crisps were the best-sellers, as well as Skittles, Starburst, Gatorade, and Powerade. “They flew out my ice chest,” he says of the drinks – by his last year of high school, he was bringing coolers full of drinks and multiple duffel bags of snacks into school. “I was stashing my bags in random classrooms’ closets,” he explains, “You couldn’t catch me carrying my bags around school.”

But Edward was caught – quite a few times. Many of his popular videos and Instagram posts describe both how to avoid being caught by teachers and what to do if you are. In one May 2019 video, he lists the best places and worst places to sell: locker rooms and bathrooms are good, classrooms and lunchrooms are bad. He advises kids to behave well and get good grades outside of selling candy so that teachers are more lenient if and when they get caught. “Only sell to your most valued customers to avoid snitches,” he sagely says.

Edward was caught selling candy six times at school – one time, he claims, school administrators set up a sting operation to catch him in the act. “They told another student to go buy from me… when the admin approached me, she was holding the same exact candy I just sold to that student,” Edward says. “The main reason they told me I’m not allowed to sell is because they have a contract with the lunch food provider, which also has their own snack bar. They have this anti-competitive contract with them.” After this altercation, Edward says he was suspended for the rest of the week.

Still, Edward returned both to school and to selling – he usually paused his business for two to three weeks after getting caught before starting up again. Towards the end of his school career, the administration approached him and offered a deal: he could sell on campus if he used the money to fundraise for the school business club. He took the deal, but also sold extra goods on the side for his own profit. He now advises his followers to strike similar deals.

In total, Edward estimates he made between $20,000 and $25,000 in revenue during his four years at high school. Every two weeks he would go to Costco and buy $400-$600 worth of snacks – in a particularly good fortnight, he could make $2,000 selling these for $1,500 profit. He saved the money and invested it into both stocks and equipment for his YouTube channel.

“At the beginning, I was only creating content for my own school… I was creating commercials and fun videos to increase awareness of my business,” he says of his motivation to become a YouTuber. He used to give friends a free bag of candy to film footage of him selling, which quickly became popular online. “It started to gain traction… so I thought, why not continue making this type of content that I’m an expert at? … I can’t sell anymore past school age, but I can pass on that knowledge to other sellers.”

Since he launched his $59 one-on-one teaching course in November 2019, Edward has had 25 clients. As well as giving them scripts and teaching them to “push past those first initial fears”, he advises them not to sell candy on credit. “People say ‘Let me get a snack and I’ll pay you tomorrow’. I advise them not to go through with that because it's very hard to enforce – there’s no contractual agreement that they will pay you back.” Edward’s top tip is to delay rejecting these people by saying you’ll make a decision at the end of the day – that way, they don’t get mad and kick up a fuss.

At the moment, however, business is down. Edward’s advertising earnings have been slashed from $300 to just $50 in March. “All candy sellers in the community are affected by this, basically all our income streams were cut,” Edward says of school closures. He says he might use the time to “pivot my own personal brand to general entrepreneurship advice for teenagers.”

Plenty of people undoubtedly disapprove of Edward’s online presence, but he has avoided angry comments so far. Under the Instagram name “Rich Snack Seller” he flaunts his cash (though, notably, it is often $1 bills he is fanning). He does giveaways of free candy to increase his following. Kids leave comments like, “I made 200 dollars in 7 days. Then I had to stop because the teachers told me to stop” and “My sales have gone down loads, been selling for a week made £18 first day and £6 today… advice please”. Edward was lucky that his own parents knew about his candy-selling and didn’t mind – other parents may be less happy that a 20-year-old is teaching their kids how to make money at school.

Edward’s defence is that a lot of successful entrepreneurs started selling when they were young. “The lessons I’ve learned from selling candy go beyond the money I earned,” he says, “One of the things I tell my viewers is to use the money and the skills you’ve learned to start your next business.”

Despite the current slump due to the coronavirus, Edward thinks candy-selling content will always perform well online. He hopes to continue to grow his YouTube channel and live entirely off his AdSense earnings. “There’s a demand for this type of content,” he says. “I do hope that my content about selling candy outlives me, in a sense. So that each new generation that comes into school will have that same inclination to start selling candy, and when they look online, they can see the start of the online community of selling snacks.”

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK