You’d think that just because candies are often eaten quickly, then they’d also be made just as fast in the candy factory, but that’s not always the case.
Flavor demands time — at least for Jelly Belly, as it takes a week or more to produce their 100-plus flavors of jelly beans. The company has a 250,000-square-foot factory in San Francisco and a team of about 200 confectioners, producing 1.25 million candies every hour. Each sweet treat is a mixture of sugar, water, cornstarch, and corn syrup to which confectioners add juices, purees, and other components to give each jelly bean an identity.
The story of each Jelly Belly jelly bean starts with a machine called mogul, which creates molds for the candy’s core. Each tray can hold more than 1,000 soft treats.
The morsels require quite a lot of rest since they need to be left untouched three times in the overall production process. Their first nap time happens overnight, on racks in a room kept above 100ºF.
Before getting a sugar shower, the beans receive a steam bath — which makes their exteriors tacky so the granules adhere and none of them stick to the other.
After two days of resting, the beans get their candy shells through spinning drums. Syrup and sugar are added by confectioners and the last of the three passes is powdered, creating a smooth and nonstick exterior. This coating increases the size of each bean by 40 percent.
At the end of the beans’ last nap, the confectioner’s glaze and carnauba wax add to their gloss. To judge their doneness, the candy makers touch them and may even try tasting a piece.
The finished beans are put into tidy rows on a conveyor belt and pass through a stamping machine that imprints Jelly Belly’s logos in food coloring.
Misshapen treats (known as Belly Flops) are filtered out when assortments mix in a tumbling barrel. Tiny beans drop through holes in the first roller; perfect-sized ones fall on a conveyor below the second, and the huge ones get stuck in the third.
Every second, nearly 1,700 jelly beans reach the end; single-flavored ones line up in a sweet rainbow row and are loaded by factory workers into boxes according to their variety.
Image credit: Christopher Payne