How Jelly Beans Are Made

Would you wait a week to eat a jelly bean? You don’t have a choice! It takes about a week (and sometimes longer) to make a jelly bean. 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, jelly beans are made in several stages and have to age, or rest, between each stage.

It all starts with the chewy center of the jelly bean. The basic recipe includes sugar, water, starch, and corn syrup mixed and cooked together to make a thick liquid. For gourmet jelly beans, a flavor is added to the mix. Traditional jelly beans 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 jelly bean-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 jelly bean centers harden overnight.

The next day, the centers come out of the molds, and the cornstarch is recycled. The centers are coated with sugar, so they will not stick together. Then they are left to rest again for another night or two.

Once the centers have aged enough, it is time to get their crunchy outer shells. The process of coating something with a sugar shell is called panning. Jordan almonds, Boston baked beans, and jaw-breakers are also coated this way. French candy makers invented the process in the 1600s. Nuts were placed in a bowl along with sugar syrup and rocked by hand until they were thickly coated.

In a modern candy kitchen, the centers are heaped into huge metal kettles that tip nearly side-ways and spin around like a clothes dryer. Flavored liquid sugar pours over the jelly beans. They get an even coating as they tumble over each other. This process repeats four times and takes about two hours.

What happens next? You guessed it! Another night (or more) of rest.

The next day, the beans go back into the spinning kettles. Now that the candy shells have had a chance to harden, the jellybeans can be polished. A few coats of special glaze are added, one at a time, to give the jellybeans their familiar smooth and shiny finish. Once more, they go into storage for the final aging or curing process. This can take up to three days or even longer, depending on the type of bean and manufacturer.