My life growing up with autism was always difficult to adapt to. 

My family has always been there for me whenever I needed help. 

In my school years, I had support from teachers helping me with my school work and making new friends. 

The high school principal was always supportive to me whenever I had problems with the students in the hallways which was always very difficult.

The students in the hallways would tend to make me mad when they made fun of me and picked on me, but I learned to ignore them over time and got along with a lot of people regardless of the bullies.

A year after graduating high school, I started working a part-time at a grocery store for three years and it was a dead-end job and unfortunately, they would never upgrade me to a full-time position or even allow me to be a cashier there even with my father coaching them on how to coach me. 

During the summer of 2018, I attended a 90-day internship at the company my father works at and I was in the I.T. department.

Even though I liked it, I felt like I couldn’t decide on what I wanted to do. 

I needed to find my place and where I was meant to be. 

When I couldn’t get a full-time position, my dad and I talked to my uncle who had bought out a Company called Sweet Daddy Corn.  The couple that owned it was retiring and decided to sell the company.  We brought one of the Sweet Daddy Corn trailers for me to run and make gourmet kettle corn in Kansas City, MO. 

I came up with the idea to make kettle corn in a variety of flavors, more than just your traditional kettle corn. 

Some of the different flavors are all available daily and some are seasonal. 

We continually come up with new flavors that are non-traditional and outside the box with an emphasis on light coatings that are exceptionally flavorful and tasty.

With my business, I want to help those with special needs to find work, get paid and get them out of the box they are placed in and help prove that most of these young adults are very intelligent, hardworking and most of all highly capable of helping to run a business.  

I have always felt that it is wrong to keep those with special needs inside a box so I am helping others to branch out of that box and open the world up to them in a new way that is going to help and inspire all of those that we are able to touch.

My name is Devon Griesemer, I am a young adult with Autism, “and I am thriving”.