Real Girls: Why it can take two weeks to make one jelly bean


	August 14, 2024

Original photo by GWImages/ Shutterstock

It can take two weeks to make one jelly bean.

The next time you pop some jelly beans into your mouth, you may want to take a moment to appreciate just how much effort goes into producing these bite-sized delights. As explained by industry giant Jelly Belly, the process begins by heating a sugar, cornstarch, corn syrup, and water mixture, known as a slurry, and adding fruit purée, juice concentrate, or other ingredients for flavoring. From there, the mixture is squirted into cornstarch-coated molding trays, and left to solidify into the chewy jelly bean centers.

The following day, the bean centers are sent through a steam bath and a sugar shower to keep them from sticking. They are then loaded into a spinning machine for a process known as "panning," in which sugar and syrup are manually applied over the course of two hours to slowly build each bean's candied shell. Following another settling period, the candies receive an additional syrup coating, before being polished with confectioner's glaze and beeswax. Upon earning a final thumbs-up by way of visual inspection and spot taste-testing, the beans are stamped with the Jelly Belly logo and shipped out into the world.

It's a lot of shower, rinse, rest, and repeat for a process that takes seven to 14 days to complete. And while that might seem like an outsized increment of time for such a tiny edible, the Americans who gobble down an average of 16 billion jelly beans every Easter seem to think it's worth it.

President Ronald Reagan had 720 bags of jelly beans delivered to the White House each month.

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National Jelly Bean Day is annually celebrated on __.

REVEAL ANSWER

		Numbers Don't Lie

World record for number of jelly beans eaten with chopsticks in one minute

Year jelly beans went to space on the space shuttle Challenger

1983

Jelly beans used for Kina Grannis' 2011 video "In Your Arms"

288,000

Average shelf life (in years) of a packaged jelly bean

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Jelly beans first appeared in the United States during the 19th century.

Nobody knows for sure where jelly beans came from, but they're said to have descended from a pair of European predecessors: jellied Turkish delights, which became the pride of Istanbul in the late 18th century, and Jordan almonds, which began receiving their candy shells in the 15th century. Allegedly mentioned early on in a Civil War-era advertisement from Boston candymaker William Schrafft, jelly beans were considered a Yuletide specialty by the end of the 19th century, before becoming more closely associated with Easter within a few decades. But perhaps the biggest step in jelly bean history came in 1965, when the Herman Goelitz Candy Company found a way to flavor both the chewy center and the crunchy shell of their Mini Jelly Beans, creating the modern marvel enjoyed by candy connoisseurs everywhere.

Today's edition of Interesting Facts was written by Tim Ott and edited by Bess Lovejoy.