Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e11 Episode Script

Hi, I'm Alfonso Ribeiro.
Welcome to "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" So we all know there are all the colors of the rainbow.
And then, there are all the colors of candy.
And trust me, there are a lot more colors of candy.
That's why every time you tear open a box or bag of these colorful goodies, you get a feast for the eyes right before you get a feast for your taste buds.
Whether it's jewel-toned jellies, crazy cut rocks, or lip-smacking licorice, nothing beats these colorful confections.
There's no colorful candy more classic than a jelly bean.
And when you're craving a bean with some of the truest tastes and far-out flavors, nothing is more iconic than a dimple-shaped Jelly Belly.
With more than 100 over-the-top flavors, including everything from draft beer and chili mango to Tabasco and even stinky socks, Jelly Belly jelly beans stand out in a sea of, well, jelly beans.
Started by German immigrant Gustav Goelitz in the 1860s, the family behind Jelly Belly spent the early part of the 20th century focusing their candy-making efforts on buttercreams and candy corn.
But the Goelitz family was always looking for new ways to satisfy America's taste for sweets.
In the 1960s, my father felt that we needed to diversify our candy line.
So in 1965, we began making jelly beans.
The bite-sized beans were a hit.
But it took another 10 years to develop the Jelly Belly we all know and love.
Jelly Bellys are starch-molded candies, which means they begin as a liquid.
In the case of a Jelly Belly, the liquid is made up of four main ingredients water, sugar, corn syrup, and starch, which are all piped in from giant silos outside the factory.
Once in the building, the ingredients come together in gigantic vats.
Now, here's where things get interesting.
Most jelly bean companies only add flavor to the candy shell.
But not here.
Jelly Belly flavors the inside as well.
We wanted to have an engaging, interactive flavor where people would take a bite of this and just go, "Wow.
" To achieve that flavor-packed punch, next they add the first round of flavors, like sour orange and coconut.
Once mixing is complete, the warm flavored mixture runs through pipes to the molding machine, where a series of precise nozzles fill the 1,260 spots in each starch-covered tray.
That is the candy that sets up and becomes the center of the Jelly Belly bean.
Once the trays are full, they're stacked 45 high before traveling along a series of indoor tracks to a heated drying room that holds 10 million beans at a time.
Here they'll sit for 24 hours to harden and set.
The next day, a conveyor carries the centers to a steam bath that removes the starch residue.
As they start to cool, the bean centers are then showered with sugar to prevent them from sticking together.
After the centers are fully dusted with just the right amount of sweetness to complement the fruity flavor, the centers drop into large trays as they make their way across the factory.
If you tried this jelly bean right now, it's really chewy and will stick to your teeth.
That's why we need it to rest before we move on to the next step.
Then crane robots come in to grab three 25-pound trays at a time and send them off for another round of hardening.
But not everything here is automated.
As the bean centers move on down the line, the candy makers unload them by hand into large, spinning vats.
The next step is called panning.
This is the part of the process where the shells are created.
As the beans tumble in a pan, the pan operators add sugar and syrup as well as additional flavoring and color to create the hard outer shell.
This is really where the artistic value comes in.
Each pan could be a little bit different, depending on how it's running that day.
Jelly Belly's commitment to authenticity can be found not only in the flavor of the beans but also in their appearance.
Let's take pear, for example.
We make it with a green shell on it.
And then, we put a little dabs of dark sugar crystals on there that actually make the specks that you may see on a pear.
The dark crystals are a variety of sugar called black sugar that includes both molasses and minerals.
In addition to creating the spots on the candy, its complexity adds to the bold flavor of the Jelly Belly beans.
Then it's on to the polishing room where the beans take a tumble with a confectionery glaze that gives them a glass-like veneer.
When those beans come out, they shine.
At this point, the candies have reached the pinnacle of fruity freshness or sumptuous sweetness and are ready to eat.
But they wouldn't be Jelly Bellys without the famous stamp.
We'll stamp each individual bean with a Jelly Belly logo.
The beans move in trays under a roller that is coated with the same food coloring used to make the bright white color of marshmallows.
Then it's on to packaging.
We have this long, long, large belt, which we call a river of beans.
And we will put every single flavor on that belt.
The belt holds all 49 varieties of jelly beans at a time and sends them into a cylinder that tumbles them all together.
The machine then drops the beans into the proper-sized bags, seals them, and then sends them down the line to be bought.
It all happens pretty fast, and it has to.
Over 14 billion Jelly Belly jelly beans are eaten every year, one very unique flavor at a time.
Coming up, what classic candy has a colorful twist? To make a bold visual statement, you don't always need lots of colors.
Sometimes, just one will do, especially if you add one heck of a twist.
Not many companies have been in the business of making bright, colorful candy longer than the American Licorice Company in Union City, California.
The original red flavor for Red Vines has been the same since it was introduced in the 1950s.
So, how was this classic candy made? Well, it starts with five ingredients.
Red Vines is only made with wheat flour, corn syrup, citric acid, flavoring, and red coloring.
It's very similar to making bread or baking cookies.
Well, sort of.
If you're making a lot of cookies.
American Licorice goes through about 200,000 gallons of corn syrup and nearly 500,000 pounds of flour every day.
Gigantic silos feed directly inside to the cook room to giant kettles that date back to the company's founding way back in 1914.
They pump the corn syrup and flour into the kettle, mix them together for 30 minutes.
Next, workers add that iconic redder-than-red coloring by hand before the whole vat simmers for just under 2 hours at 180 degrees.
Half an hour before it's done, the last ingredient goes in the flavor.
What exactly is in that sweet and fruity flavoring is a closely guarded company secret, so secret that it's actually hidden in a safe.
When the cooking time is up, all 4,200 pounds of licorice dough comes out of the kettle to cool.
That's a hefty load to carry.
But luckily, they don't have to.
We will have about 12 dough cans ready, uh, and we'll go underneath and open a hatch.
And all the candy is just gonna free-flow just by gravity.
Smart, huh? Now all they have to do is cover each barrel with plastic and set it aside for 24 hours.
But just how do these giant 250-pound cans of dough become those slender Red Vines we all know and love? That's where the extruder comes in, which means these barrels of dough have to go downstairs.
Once again, they let gravity do the hard work.
This time, it drops right through a chute in the floor.
It takes anywhere from 8 to 12 dough cans to fill the chute.
Once full, they start up the pump and away we go.
We have a mechanism that is turning the spindles on that dough so that we can give the nice curly motion onto the candy.
It also has air injected into it to leave a hollow space in the middle.
The machine then pinches the ends of each vine shut, places them on pans, and then ejects each pan full of candy so they can travel over to the baking racks.
The rack holds 90 pans.
And there's a person putting those pans into that rack at 30 pans per minute.
The candy is baked at 140 degrees between six to eight hours in order to remove some of the moisture, which help keep the Red Vines fresh over time.
Over 14,000 gallons of water are removed from our candy in the drying process every day.
Once it's reached the perfect 18% to 22% moisture content, it's ready to wrap.
We make over 30 million pounds of Red Vines in one year.
And if you laid all the candy that we made, and it circled the Earth, it would go around 3.
8 times.
That's a lot of candy.
Coming up, just how do you get a whole apple inside a tiny candy? Colorful candy has a long and, well, colorful history.
And there's one classic kind of sugary treat that never goes out of style.
When you want old-fashioned candy, the kind grandma used to give you when you were a kid, what do you do? You look for candy made by Primrose Candy in Chicago.
My grandma and grandpa started Primrose Candy in 1928, and we named it after a flower that my grandpa used to make out of candy.
And one of the most beloved products at Primrose is their classic cut rock candy.
A cut rock candy is a piece of candy that has a design on the inside of it.
My great-grandfather saw the cut rock and realized that he had the ability to create that design in a three-dimensional way.
When it comes to creating these unique candies, Primrose doesn't mess with what's worked for almost 90 years.
We start off by pumping corn syrup and liquid sugar into our cooker, and it gets cooked to about 290 degrees.
Once the giant kettle cookers have that hot mix fully blended, they pour out the amount they need for the next design, which today is an apple.
And they don't skimp on that sweet stuff.
That's about 120 pounds worth of candy right there.
Once the sugar is all mixed together into a large ball of dough, they pull some smaller pieces out of that big hunk so they can start creating those vividly colored shapes and designs.
The options in cut rock designs are pretty much limitless.
We have the unique ability to basically make the candy any flavor and color that you want in any combination that you want, flavors that people have never heard of.
But whether peppermint or pineapple, cranberry or kiwi, the color and flavoring gets worked right in by hand.
To make these little apples, they're using red for the outside, green for the stem.
It's almost like they're kneading giant batches of bread dough.
But this isn't flour.
It's sugar.
The true art, though, is in giving each slab of dough not only the right color and flavor, but the right shape.
And they're all very basic geometric forms circles or cylinders, uh, squares, rectangles.
You take a piece, and you'll continue to fold it.
And then, you'll flip it to keep the form.
To help make sure each shape comes out just how they want it, they use first a cooling table to get the candy to a temperature where it can hold its form.
And then, a heated table to keep it malleable.
While that's going on, they're also working on the last piece of the puzzle, which also happens to be the biggest.
And we make the remainder of the 120-pound batch generally as a jacket.
It's called a jacket because it's about to become the outside layer of each piece of candy.
And to make it, they have to bring on the heavy machinery.
Literally.
This machine uses its massive arms to beat the color into the sugar dough.
When it's been beaten into submission, the jacket moves over to the kneading machine which whips it all together like taffy until it's all one, uniform color.
Now everything is ready for the next and most crucial step.
We put the triangles and rectangles and cylinders all together.
We then put it on the cooling table to get that last center cylinder to the correct consistency because the center has to be cooler than the outside so that, when it goes through the line and it cuts at the very end, it has that nice, clean-cut finish.
Now it's time for that cool center to get its warm jacket.
You put the center in the middle.
And then you form the jacket around it.
So now we have a giant that measures an entire foot in diameter.
How does this monolith turn into those little, tiny gems of old-fashioned candy we saw before? They start with a batch roll, whose superhuman strength squeezes that big cylinder down to size.
The batch roller will size it from the 12 inches down to about 3.
And then, it goes through some additional sizers.
And that will bring the rope down to about five-eighths of an inch.
That's more like it.
That rope then spins its way through a 15-foot pipe to cool down and harden.
By the time it gets to the end, it's cool enough where the cutter at the end will just just slightly tap it.
And it breaks off little pieces.
A whole lot of those gorgeous little pieces, too.
Up to 1,000 every minute, that's almost half a million pieces of candy per day.
What's cool is that each tiny piece retains the exact pattern of the giant log they started with, in this case an apple.
When enough of them have collected, they join all the other sets of cut rock candy made that day on a big table.
And then, all those shiny jewels are jumbled together to create the perfect, classic mix just like at grandma's.
A lot of people tend to buy it because it's a memory of what their grandparents used to have when they were kids.
It's a nostalgic piece of candy.
Coming up, who wouldn't want to share a movie with these guys? They sound like guys you might want to hang out with, old-school buddies you'd invite to a barbecue or card game.
But trust me, these colorful characters are a whole lot sweeter.
We're talking Mike & Ikes, the fruit-flavored candy with the familiar green box that's been a movie-theater staple since the dawn of Technicolor.
The JustBorn company of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has been making all sorts of candy since 1923.
But back in 1940, they noticed something was missing.
The company decided that it really needed to have a line of colorful, flavorful, chewy candies.
And the name of the two guys who came up with the idea? You guessed it.
Mike and Ike.
Even outside of the package, our fans can look at a piece of Mike & Ike candy and know that it's our brand because of that unique oblong shape.
Every batch of Mike & Ikes takes several days to make.
On the first day, we take the main ingredients, which are sugar, corn syrup, and starch.
And we mix them together and heat them.
Then the whole batch is pumped over to a holding tank.
Now, this is the part of the show where the robots take over.
No, no, no.
Not of civilization, just the process of making Mike & Ikes.
Each individual mold gets filled with a sweet, sticky mixture.
Then, the trays are automatically stacked under the last until each stack is 40 trays high.
Every minute, our manufacturing facility produces 75,000 individual pieces.
Next, the tray stacks are pushed into a machine that looks kind of like an elevator, except this elevator doesn't go up and down.
It goes side to side all the way across the room to the oven, where all those Mike & Ikes get baked at 180 degrees for 19 hours.
After the extended sauna treatment, one by one, the tray stacks are flipped over and out go thousands of fledgling Mike & Ikes.
The beans make their way over to the shakeout area, where the excess starch is actually kicked off the middle as they are cooled.
And then, eventually, they are dumped into big, plastic trays.
I guess, after all that shaking, Mike and Ike are tired because they're calling it a day.
They'll sit in these trays overnight to set.
By the next day, they are nice and firm and ready to get those classic Mike & Ike coatings.
The Mike & Ike centers are actually put into big pans that look a lot like cement mixers.
While they tumble, the candy makers add the color and flavor to each batch of Mike & Ike orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon and lime.
They also add a bunch more sugar.
I mean, it can't hurt, right? And the process adds more than flavor and color to the 250 pounds or so of candy each mixer starts out with.
It also adds some serious mass.
After about 35 to 40 minutes, it'll actually make its way up to 500 pounds when it's done.
This is also where the candy gets its one-of-a-kind look.
When the Mike & Ike middles come out of their oven, they're not exactly that perfect shape that fans have come to know.
And so, it's during the engrossing phase where it gets its familiar oblong shape.
The tumbling may have smoothed and rounded the candy into a classic Mike & Ike shape, but there's still one last step polishing.
The operators will add a little bit of liquid sugar and confectioner's glaze.
That process only takes about 25 minutes.
By the time it's done, the product comes out looking like glass.
Think, that's the Mike & Ike generations of moviegoers have come to know and love.
All they have to do now is mix those classic Mike & Ike flavors together.
Then, they're boxed, wrapped, and shipped to stores and movie theaters nationwide.
Oh, I'm I got you right.
Booyah.
Boo to the yeah.
Sweet.
Colorful candy Whoop, my bad.
Sorry.
One more time.