Along the tour, multiple displays feature details about what is happening on the production floor below. Guests will see the various methods of making a jelly belly bean. On an elevated walkway, you can peek down at the different processes used to produce the tasty jelly bean candy. During the visit, you will see how this world-famous candy is manufactured.
JELLY BELLY FACTORY FREE
The forty-minute tour is free, and in the end, you get a free sample bag of candy. But beware the gag flavors, such as barf and boogers, which have all the children agog with anticipation.Jelly Belly Candy Factory Tour is a fun day for kids and adults. If all that trivia makes you peckish, rest assured there are also several chances to sample the goods while you gawk at the tiny candy gems. These flawed beans find their way into the discounted Belly Flops product line. If a bean is too small, too large or not perfectly coated, it is rejected from the assembly line. If you lined them up, they would be as long as a blue whale.Īlmost 362,880 pounds of jelly beans are produced per day (that’s as heavy as 24 elephants), but the company is a still a stickler for consistency. About 1,680 beans are produced per second. The process is complex, with top-secret recipes involved, but the magic of it all is coating a gooey gob of goodness with a perfect sugary shell through a technique known as panning. The factory, which operates 24 hours a day, five days a week, is a colossal candy beehive humming with workers, robots and machines turning sugar, fruit and other ingredients into jelly bean bliss. An estimated 600,000 jelly bean devotees - enough people to pack Madison Square Garden 33 times - take the tour every year to bone up on bean trivia while frolicking in a brightly colored wonderland of decadence. The Jelly Belly company, which has been plying its trade since 1898, has a lot of trivia to share as you stroll along the quarter-mile long conveyor belt for its famous tour.
Reagan always claimed that you could tell a man’s character by how he ate his jelly beans, grabbing a handful or picking out all the Tutti-Fruitti, though it’s not clear what that distinction might be.Ĭertainly, there’s a science to cooking up the perfect jelly bean, which takes about seven to 14 days from start to finish.
Indeed, a special flavor (blueberry) was minted in honor of his presidential inauguration - 40 million beans were nibbled at the celebration - so they would be able to make a red, white and blue Jelly Belly flag. The Gipper’s love for the candy is so legendary that there’s even a Jelly Belly collage, involving no fewer than 17,000 beans, of his kisser on display at the factory. Indeed, Reagan was so in love with Jelly Bellys that he made them the first jelly beans in space by sending them along on a space shuttle Challenger mission in 1983. He got hooked on jelly beans when he quit smoking by the time he became president, he was a full-blown fanatic. Ronald Reagan made the candies cool in pop culture. Five billion Jelly Bellys (which come in 133 flavors) are sold at Easter alone.īut in the 1960s, the beans really entered the limelight when California Gov. Not until the 1930s did these brightly colored balls of sugar become associated with Easter, perhaps because they resemble eggs, which are symbols of fertility meant to evoke the promise of spring. In the early 20th century, “jelly bean” was a slang term for snazzily dressed man with an eye for the ladies. Put them together, and you have a treat addictive enough that Boston candymaker William Schrafft urged all good Americans to send them to the Union soldiers fighting in the Civil War.īy the 19th century, jelly beans were widely considered a classic penny candy.
Experts think they may be a mashup of two candies, Turkish delight, with its chewy fruit center, and Jordan almonds, with their crunchy sugar shells. There, you’ll learn that jelly beans have an ancient pedigree. If you want to consider yourself a true connoisseur of the confection, you can take a crash course at one of the candy’s meccas - the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield. The Bay Area: 50 places to go and things to know But how many of us know where the jelly bean comes from or why it’s such a star at Easter celebrations? Bet you didn’t even know that there’s a National Jelly Bean Day (April 22). Clearly, most of us have zero control when it comes to the kryptonite of the candy world. The number of jelly beans - 15 billion! - gobbled up in any given year would circle the Earth 5.5 times. Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California: Taking the tour