ONE WEEK WONDER

WOULD YOU WAIT a week to eat a jellybean?

- Rebecca van den Ham

You don’t have a choice! It takes about a week (and sometimes longer) to make a jellybean. Candy factories make thousands of these tiny yummies, but only one flavor can be made at a time.

Why does it take so long? Unlike other candies made by shaping or molding a sugar mixture, jellybeans are made in several stages and have to age, or rest, between each stage.

It all starts with the chewy center of the jellybean. The basic recipe includes sugar, water, starch, and corn syrup mixed and cooked together to make a thick liquid. For gourmet jellybeans, a flavor is added to the mix. Traditional jellybeans have plain centers with flavor only in the outer shell.

The liquid moves to the next stage through pipes. Before it arrives, hundreds of trays are prepared with a layer of fine cornstarch. A machine, called a die, presses perfect jellybean-shaped holes into the cornstarch. Thousands of these tiny molds fill wooden or plastic trays.

The trays move along a conveyor belt as another machine quickly squirts liquid candy into each hole. Once the trays are filled, they are stacked and moved to a heated room where the jellybean centers harden overnight.