Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s02e01 Episode Script
Movie Munchies
On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we go to the movies.
From sugary straws that pack a real punch to chocolate-coated, bite-size pieces of cookie dough, to the rainbow of flavors in these chewy candies, a night at the movies wouldn't be the same without these delicious movie munchies.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than licking the spatula after my mom whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Then I discovered these.
Mmm.
These delicious morsels of chocolate-covered cookie dough are called Cookie Dough Bites, and they're almost as popular as popcorn at the movie theater.
Growing up, I absolutely loved when my mother made cookie dough and baked cookies in the house.
I actually even licked the bowl.
Scott grew up to start Taste of Nature, a company that made snacks for local theaters.
Then, inspiration struck.
In 1997, we decided to launch a cookie dough candy because there was no other cookie dough candies in the marketplace.
And movie theaters were the perfect place to launch them.
Making these unique chocolate-coated treats starts with the cookie dough centers, which are made with pretty much the same ingredients Scott's mom used to use.
First, bags of flour are poured into giant mixing bowls.
Then, they add sugar, vanilla flavoring and, of course, lots of chocolate chips.
The portions would not be too different than a typical recipe you might see at home for making your delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies, but we are making large quantities at a time sometimes 2,000 pounds per batch.
The ingredients are mixed together for about 20 minutes and then transferred to perhaps the best-named machine ever the chunker.
The spinning arms on the chunker scrape off smaller chunks.
Those chunks then go onto a conveyer and up into a hopper.
But how do we go from a 5-pound mound of dough to a bite-size morsel? That happens here in the extruder.
And at the end of the extruder awaits the whirling arm of cookie dough pellet chopping.
It's gonna actually, just like a pasta maker, press the dough through a plate that is shaped in a way that we can then cut the pieces uniformly so that they are all shaped into the little pellets.
One thing to keep in mind these little nuggets are totally edible right now.
But there's more to come.
The pellets travel up to what looks like a cookie dough waterfall.
Destination, the cooling tunnel.
It's nitrogen-blasted, sometimes gets as cold as -40 to even -50 degrees.
It's very cold.
When they come out of the tunnel, the now frozen bites cascade into the tumbler, where they're, well, tumbled to make sure they don't freeze together and also to make sure they're ready for the next step.
As if cookie dough isn't delicious enough, these are about to get coated with chocolate.
Inside this enormous tank is Inside, the chocolate is constantly mixed and heated to 120 degrees to keep it thick and creamy.
And that giant vat of chocolate is about to merge with millions of little pellets of cookie dough.
First, it's pumped up through this tube into the coating room.
These spinning cement mixer-like pans are filled with the cookie dough pellets.
Then, a fine mist of chocolate is sprayed onto them.
Seriously, what could be better than a fine mist of chocolate? But it's not as simple as it looks.
When working with chocolate, temperature is crucial.
Too warm, and it'll just drip off.
Too cold, and it won't coat evenly.
We'll try to control the amount of temperature and moisture by blowing air, which is on the colder side, directly into the pan.
The coating process goes on for about 45 minutes, until the candies are at the proper size and weight.
That coating has a weight ratio of about 50% chocolate coating to 50% center, roughly speaking.
And that's in addition to the chocolate chips that we put in at the center.
It's not crunchy, but it's not too firm.
At this point, they may look like they're ready for packaging, but there's still one more step.
We then transport them into the polishing pan, where we will add a confectioner's glaze, which will give it its nice, finished shine.
All that's left to do now is to pack and ship them, and that happens here in the packaging room.
We will then pour them into a hopper, where they are then taken up a bucket elevator, where they are weighed out and dropped into little buckets that allow us to control the weight of each package.
From there, they're wrapped in cellophane.
And then this contraption grabs and opens the boxes.
The boxes are then loaded with cookie bites and shipped out to movie theaters everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.
Cookie Dough Bites are happily munched all over the world.
Of course, you don't have to eat them only in movie theaters.
They can be just as good at home, though Scott does have one little trick to getting the most out of each tasty Cookie Dough Bite.
We do have a lot of customers that love to freeze them and eat them cold.
Now, that's a delicious treat.
Coming up, discover how these tart treats can make your sweet tooth crave sour.
And later, learn how these iconic candies get their one-of-a-kind chew.
Hey! Something sweet is usually the go-to snack at the movie theater candy counter.
But this popular treat will really make you pucker up.
This treat has had moviegoers puckering up for over 20 years.
American Licorice has been making traditionally sweet candy since 1914.
But then, in 1990, they decided to add a new taste to their long, skinny lineup sour.
The Sour Punch Straw was born and was an immediate box office hit.
That little kid, you know, excitement, like, "Oh, my god, I'd jump out of my pants because I want, you know, Sour Punch.
" Sour Punch Straws start out much like any other candy with a mix of simple ingredients including sugar, flour, corn syrup, and water in giant kettles.
The flour is pumped into the kettle from a silo.
And then the sugars are poured in on top.
And they need quite a bit of both.
Each batch in one of these kettles weighs about 1,500 pounds.
Once those ingredients have had a chance to mix it up for a while, it's time for the flavors.
Sour Punch Straws come in a rainbow of flavors, including, well, rainbow.
Which consists of blue, strawberry, apple, and lemonade.
Wait, did he say blue? So blue is a flavor? I knew it! Blue is made with this super-concentrated blue raspberry flavoring.
The concentrate is mixed into the kettle with other ingredients and heated to 170 degrees.
Then the mixture is pumped into a cooker, where it starts to remove the excess moisture.
And then this vacuum-sealed box called the hopper box dries it out a bit more.
If the excess moisture's not removed, it'll never make it up the incline belt and into the cooling tunnel.
It would wrap all over the place.
Not cool.
Then it's pumped out of the hopper box and into the extruder.
Ah, now they're starting to look like straws.
They're still pretty hot, though, so it's into another cooling tunnel to chill for a bit.
This one's 40 feet long.
It's almost a giant refrigerator about 65 degrees there.
That'll start to take the candy from being such a tacky candy to a little more solidified, a little more dry.
These long, blue straws may look ready to eat, but they still have to get their sour on.
And in order for that to happen, they have to pass through a steaming unit, which adds some of the stickiness back that was lost in the drying and cooling process.
It's not tacky at that point to where it could actually collect the sour blend, so it has to bring some kind of tackiness back to it.
That's right we're bringing tacky back.
Then, it's onto the sugar sander, where the straws are sandblasted with face-puckering sour punch flavor.
The coating is mostly a combination of citric acid and sugar, and it's making my mouth water just looking at it.
Then it all slides through a machine that groups it into bunches of 10 and cuts each bunch to the proper size.
The blade on the knife comes down, cuts the candy into 7.
5 inches.
Once they've cut the straws, they kick it into overdrive.
The groups of separate straws are divided into four lanes.
Once it's split off into its four lanes, it hits another transfer belt, which then will transfer onto four different expressways, is what we call them.
Each of these expressways has a sensor in that determines exactly where each group of straws is on the line so a tray can be strategically placed next to each line.
Then the belt narrows and the straws drop right into the tray.
Man, I wish they could make traffic on the freeway run this smoothly.
But the process isn't completely automated.
Each package is personally inspected before it's sealed and shipped out.
It's automation with a human touch.
What they're actually checking is that it's the right length, it has the right color, it has an ample amount of sour blend that's around it.
They're doing about 125 to 130 packages a minute.
And that all adds up to a whole lot of Sour Punch Straws about 41/2 million trays a month.
Last year, if we were to take straws and tie them all together and wrap it around the Earth, we could wrap straws around the Earth three times.
Now, that would definitely make the world a better place.
When we return, we uncover the secret to making the ultimate movie pretzel.
Hey! Soft, salty, chewy, dipped in some delicious mustard.
Just the smell of one of these twisty treats takes me right back to the movie theater.
And when they're as big and delicious as the jumbo double twist soft pretzel from the San Diego Pretzel Company, they can last all the way to the final chase scene.
Pretzel Company founder, Harris Golden, was a high-end chef, but his real passion was pretzels.
I love pretzels.
I grew up in New York City, and I always ate pretzels.
Pretzels were in mblood.
In fact, he loved them so much he started San Diego Pretzel Company to make them for movie theater's across the country.
Their signature product, the jumbo double-twist, starts with a very simple recipe of flour, yeast, and salt.
It's a sourdough.
Sourdough is one of the holy grails of pretzel making.
But creating a good sourdough is a delicate process, so the next ingredient is very important ice water.
The reason is simple.
Warm water would activate the sourdough yeast, and the dough would rise too quickly.
Once the ice water is added, the 240 pounds of dough is mixed in a giant mixer for 12 to 15 minutes.
You wanna get a good dough that stretches right.
It has a nice elasticity.
They call it a velvet feeling.
Mmm, velvet is right.
That dough is smooth.
That velvety batch of dough then heads over to the cutting machine, where it's trimmed into pieces that are just the right size for the pretzel.
From there, it's off to the rolling machine.
So far, machines have been doing most of the work.
But here's where the pretzel-making magic happens on the rolling tables.
You cannot make a great pretzel unless you're doing it by hand.
There is an art form in making pretzels.
You have to have a certain speed.
You wanna make it look beautiful.
You want that good look, but yet, you don't wanna over-roll it.
With the jumbo twist, the rolling is particularly tricky because they're working with not one, but two strands of pretzel dough.
You grab the dough, and then you spin one side.
And it just spin by itself.
And then you lock it on the table.
And then you have the twist in the middle.
Whoa, talk about doing the twist.
That is awesome.
Once they have enough pretzels to fill up a rack, they move them all into the proofer, which is kind of like a little steam room for pretzel dough.
A proofer has steam and heat at the same time.
The heat is to proof the pretzel, but the steam is so you won't get a dry pretzel.
And the timing is done by feel, not by a timer.
The bakers have to use their judgment as to when the pretzels are just right.
You have to look at them and say, "It's perfect.
" Yes.
Next, those perfect pretzels go into the freezer room overnight to stop the rising and let the flavor develop properly.
And then, it's time for one last special touch.
After it comes out of the cold room, it goes into our secret process.
And I say it's a secret process 'cause it really is something that we've developed over the years, so we're not gonna show you, right? We may not know what the secret process is, but we do know what it does.
It gives each pretzel that perfect, shiny, golden-brown color once it's baked.
So it's into the oven they go, but not for long.
They bake for only 7 or 8 minutes.
Like everything else about making the perfect pretzel, baking is more art than science.
We bake it until we just feel, "That's just right.
" These perfectly baked pretzels are moist and steamy and ready to eat, but we can't yet.
These pretzels rest for about 10 minutes.
And then they're flash-frozen so they won't stick together during packaging.
We have a very strong, powerful freezer so that it gets hard within about a half an hour's time.
Then the trays of frozen pretzels are loaded by hand into boxes 28 per box.
Last but not least, a half-pound of bag of pretzel salt goes into the box to be added when the pretzels are reheated.
Pretzel salt is a light, airy, almost a puffed salt, you might call it.
And then it's off to the movies.
Coming up, the secret ingredient behind this old-school movie treat may surprise you.
Hey! They're not exactly a gumdrop and not exactly a gummy.
But they're colorful and fruity, and they have been one of America's favorite movie snacks since Harry Truman was in the White House.
They're Dots, and they've been going to the movies since the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In 1945, Brooklyn's Mason Candy Company first introduced this bite-size confection, and Dots joined the Tootsie Company brands in 1972.
It is unique in the world of gumdrops.
It is both one you can store in your mouth and melt it away, or you can chew it.
So what is it that makes Dots so different from other gummies? Well, it's the main ingredient.
Dots are made with starch, unlike most gummy candies, which use gelatin.
The starch is blended with sugar, water, and corn syrup.
It's all mixed up in these huge kettles then slow-cooked for about an hour and a half.
If we heat up the product too quickly, it starts to become too thick or too viscous and won't go through all the rest of our cooking process.
Once it's ready, the mixture gets divided into five separate kettles, one for each flavor cherry, lime, orange, strawberry, and lemon.
Each flavor has a slightly different amount of acid in it, and those key ingredients go into each one of those kettles.
Once all the ingredients are combined, it's time for my favorite part.
Here come the Dots.
And that happens here in the depositor.
The depositor has six vessels right on top of it.
And those vessels hold those flavors, and we fill the boards from there.
The boards are starch molds filled with hundreds of little Dots-shaped impressions.
Each tray holds about 1,000 Dots, and the depositor can fill about 30 trays per minute.
Some quick math here, and you've got more than 23 million Dots a day.
In fact, it's about 350 miles of Dots.
Right now, all of them are still pretty sticky and gooey.
To fix that, they take these huge stacks of 150 trays apiece into curing rooms, where they'll spend the night.
These are also known as hot rooms, since they are kept at a balmy The curing rooms are used to remove moisture and make them hard enough so that people can pick them up and actually eat them.
The next morning, they're hauled back out and unstacked so they form a tray of molds.
Then each one is flipped.
Uh-oh! And all those Dots come tumbling out.
From there, they go into a bucket lift and under a high-speed air jet that's kind of like a car wash.
We just blow a lot of air on them to remove the starch.
This vibrating sieve shakes some more starch out before the Dots drop through and onto a conveyor, which takes them through a cooling tunnel almost as long as a football field.
We target a certain humidity and temperature, with the whole goal of when a product is exposed to final packaging, it doesn't lose any moisture and it doesn't gain any moisture.
So, now, these little guys taste like Dots, and they feel like Dots.
But they don't have that classic Dots shine just yet.
For that, there's one more step.
They head back down a chute and into a giant tumbler.
We put a little carnuba wax on there to make them shiny.
And out they come fully-finished Dots ready for packaging.
The Dots head into the packaging room on overhead conveyor belts.
They're carefully weighed and distributed evenly into the boxes evenly and quickly.
We weigh Dots into boxes at a rate of 240 boxes per minute.
And those boxes are headed to a theater near you.
They're easy to share.
They're easy to open up in the dark, easy to pour out and just delightful to eat throughout the movie.
This is the season that Alfonso gets fat.
I don't expect everything to be handed to me.
It's not what I'm used to hearing you say.
It might actually be on a set.
Or it's real.
Which one?
0," we go to the movies.
From sugary straws that pack a real punch to chocolate-coated, bite-size pieces of cookie dough, to the rainbow of flavors in these chewy candies, a night at the movies wouldn't be the same without these delicious movie munchies.
When I was a kid, there was nothing better than licking the spatula after my mom whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
Then I discovered these.
Mmm.
These delicious morsels of chocolate-covered cookie dough are called Cookie Dough Bites, and they're almost as popular as popcorn at the movie theater.
Growing up, I absolutely loved when my mother made cookie dough and baked cookies in the house.
I actually even licked the bowl.
Scott grew up to start Taste of Nature, a company that made snacks for local theaters.
Then, inspiration struck.
In 1997, we decided to launch a cookie dough candy because there was no other cookie dough candies in the marketplace.
And movie theaters were the perfect place to launch them.
Making these unique chocolate-coated treats starts with the cookie dough centers, which are made with pretty much the same ingredients Scott's mom used to use.
First, bags of flour are poured into giant mixing bowls.
Then, they add sugar, vanilla flavoring and, of course, lots of chocolate chips.
The portions would not be too different than a typical recipe you might see at home for making your delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies, but we are making large quantities at a time sometimes 2,000 pounds per batch.
The ingredients are mixed together for about 20 minutes and then transferred to perhaps the best-named machine ever the chunker.
The spinning arms on the chunker scrape off smaller chunks.
Those chunks then go onto a conveyer and up into a hopper.
But how do we go from a 5-pound mound of dough to a bite-size morsel? That happens here in the extruder.
And at the end of the extruder awaits the whirling arm of cookie dough pellet chopping.
It's gonna actually, just like a pasta maker, press the dough through a plate that is shaped in a way that we can then cut the pieces uniformly so that they are all shaped into the little pellets.
One thing to keep in mind these little nuggets are totally edible right now.
But there's more to come.
The pellets travel up to what looks like a cookie dough waterfall.
Destination, the cooling tunnel.
It's nitrogen-blasted, sometimes gets as cold as -40 to even -50 degrees.
It's very cold.
When they come out of the tunnel, the now frozen bites cascade into the tumbler, where they're, well, tumbled to make sure they don't freeze together and also to make sure they're ready for the next step.
As if cookie dough isn't delicious enough, these are about to get coated with chocolate.
Inside this enormous tank is Inside, the chocolate is constantly mixed and heated to 120 degrees to keep it thick and creamy.
And that giant vat of chocolate is about to merge with millions of little pellets of cookie dough.
First, it's pumped up through this tube into the coating room.
These spinning cement mixer-like pans are filled with the cookie dough pellets.
Then, a fine mist of chocolate is sprayed onto them.
Seriously, what could be better than a fine mist of chocolate? But it's not as simple as it looks.
When working with chocolate, temperature is crucial.
Too warm, and it'll just drip off.
Too cold, and it won't coat evenly.
We'll try to control the amount of temperature and moisture by blowing air, which is on the colder side, directly into the pan.
The coating process goes on for about 45 minutes, until the candies are at the proper size and weight.
That coating has a weight ratio of about 50% chocolate coating to 50% center, roughly speaking.
And that's in addition to the chocolate chips that we put in at the center.
It's not crunchy, but it's not too firm.
At this point, they may look like they're ready for packaging, but there's still one more step.
We then transport them into the polishing pan, where we will add a confectioner's glaze, which will give it its nice, finished shine.
All that's left to do now is to pack and ship them, and that happens here in the packaging room.
We will then pour them into a hopper, where they are then taken up a bucket elevator, where they are weighed out and dropped into little buckets that allow us to control the weight of each package.
From there, they're wrapped in cellophane.
And then this contraption grabs and opens the boxes.
The boxes are then loaded with cookie bites and shipped out to movie theaters everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.
Cookie Dough Bites are happily munched all over the world.
Of course, you don't have to eat them only in movie theaters.
They can be just as good at home, though Scott does have one little trick to getting the most out of each tasty Cookie Dough Bite.
We do have a lot of customers that love to freeze them and eat them cold.
Now, that's a delicious treat.
Coming up, discover how these tart treats can make your sweet tooth crave sour.
And later, learn how these iconic candies get their one-of-a-kind chew.
Hey! Something sweet is usually the go-to snack at the movie theater candy counter.
But this popular treat will really make you pucker up.
This treat has had moviegoers puckering up for over 20 years.
American Licorice has been making traditionally sweet candy since 1914.
But then, in 1990, they decided to add a new taste to their long, skinny lineup sour.
The Sour Punch Straw was born and was an immediate box office hit.
That little kid, you know, excitement, like, "Oh, my god, I'd jump out of my pants because I want, you know, Sour Punch.
" Sour Punch Straws start out much like any other candy with a mix of simple ingredients including sugar, flour, corn syrup, and water in giant kettles.
The flour is pumped into the kettle from a silo.
And then the sugars are poured in on top.
And they need quite a bit of both.
Each batch in one of these kettles weighs about 1,500 pounds.
Once those ingredients have had a chance to mix it up for a while, it's time for the flavors.
Sour Punch Straws come in a rainbow of flavors, including, well, rainbow.
Which consists of blue, strawberry, apple, and lemonade.
Wait, did he say blue? So blue is a flavor? I knew it! Blue is made with this super-concentrated blue raspberry flavoring.
The concentrate is mixed into the kettle with other ingredients and heated to 170 degrees.
Then the mixture is pumped into a cooker, where it starts to remove the excess moisture.
And then this vacuum-sealed box called the hopper box dries it out a bit more.
If the excess moisture's not removed, it'll never make it up the incline belt and into the cooling tunnel.
It would wrap all over the place.
Not cool.
Then it's pumped out of the hopper box and into the extruder.
Ah, now they're starting to look like straws.
They're still pretty hot, though, so it's into another cooling tunnel to chill for a bit.
This one's 40 feet long.
It's almost a giant refrigerator about 65 degrees there.
That'll start to take the candy from being such a tacky candy to a little more solidified, a little more dry.
These long, blue straws may look ready to eat, but they still have to get their sour on.
And in order for that to happen, they have to pass through a steaming unit, which adds some of the stickiness back that was lost in the drying and cooling process.
It's not tacky at that point to where it could actually collect the sour blend, so it has to bring some kind of tackiness back to it.
That's right we're bringing tacky back.
Then, it's onto the sugar sander, where the straws are sandblasted with face-puckering sour punch flavor.
The coating is mostly a combination of citric acid and sugar, and it's making my mouth water just looking at it.
Then it all slides through a machine that groups it into bunches of 10 and cuts each bunch to the proper size.
The blade on the knife comes down, cuts the candy into 7.
5 inches.
Once they've cut the straws, they kick it into overdrive.
The groups of separate straws are divided into four lanes.
Once it's split off into its four lanes, it hits another transfer belt, which then will transfer onto four different expressways, is what we call them.
Each of these expressways has a sensor in that determines exactly where each group of straws is on the line so a tray can be strategically placed next to each line.
Then the belt narrows and the straws drop right into the tray.
Man, I wish they could make traffic on the freeway run this smoothly.
But the process isn't completely automated.
Each package is personally inspected before it's sealed and shipped out.
It's automation with a human touch.
What they're actually checking is that it's the right length, it has the right color, it has an ample amount of sour blend that's around it.
They're doing about 125 to 130 packages a minute.
And that all adds up to a whole lot of Sour Punch Straws about 41/2 million trays a month.
Last year, if we were to take straws and tie them all together and wrap it around the Earth, we could wrap straws around the Earth three times.
Now, that would definitely make the world a better place.
When we return, we uncover the secret to making the ultimate movie pretzel.
Hey! Soft, salty, chewy, dipped in some delicious mustard.
Just the smell of one of these twisty treats takes me right back to the movie theater.
And when they're as big and delicious as the jumbo double twist soft pretzel from the San Diego Pretzel Company, they can last all the way to the final chase scene.
Pretzel Company founder, Harris Golden, was a high-end chef, but his real passion was pretzels.
I love pretzels.
I grew up in New York City, and I always ate pretzels.
Pretzels were in mblood.
In fact, he loved them so much he started San Diego Pretzel Company to make them for movie theater's across the country.
Their signature product, the jumbo double-twist, starts with a very simple recipe of flour, yeast, and salt.
It's a sourdough.
Sourdough is one of the holy grails of pretzel making.
But creating a good sourdough is a delicate process, so the next ingredient is very important ice water.
The reason is simple.
Warm water would activate the sourdough yeast, and the dough would rise too quickly.
Once the ice water is added, the 240 pounds of dough is mixed in a giant mixer for 12 to 15 minutes.
You wanna get a good dough that stretches right.
It has a nice elasticity.
They call it a velvet feeling.
Mmm, velvet is right.
That dough is smooth.
That velvety batch of dough then heads over to the cutting machine, where it's trimmed into pieces that are just the right size for the pretzel.
From there, it's off to the rolling machine.
So far, machines have been doing most of the work.
But here's where the pretzel-making magic happens on the rolling tables.
You cannot make a great pretzel unless you're doing it by hand.
There is an art form in making pretzels.
You have to have a certain speed.
You wanna make it look beautiful.
You want that good look, but yet, you don't wanna over-roll it.
With the jumbo twist, the rolling is particularly tricky because they're working with not one, but two strands of pretzel dough.
You grab the dough, and then you spin one side.
And it just spin by itself.
And then you lock it on the table.
And then you have the twist in the middle.
Whoa, talk about doing the twist.
That is awesome.
Once they have enough pretzels to fill up a rack, they move them all into the proofer, which is kind of like a little steam room for pretzel dough.
A proofer has steam and heat at the same time.
The heat is to proof the pretzel, but the steam is so you won't get a dry pretzel.
And the timing is done by feel, not by a timer.
The bakers have to use their judgment as to when the pretzels are just right.
You have to look at them and say, "It's perfect.
" Yes.
Next, those perfect pretzels go into the freezer room overnight to stop the rising and let the flavor develop properly.
And then, it's time for one last special touch.
After it comes out of the cold room, it goes into our secret process.
And I say it's a secret process 'cause it really is something that we've developed over the years, so we're not gonna show you, right? We may not know what the secret process is, but we do know what it does.
It gives each pretzel that perfect, shiny, golden-brown color once it's baked.
So it's into the oven they go, but not for long.
They bake for only 7 or 8 minutes.
Like everything else about making the perfect pretzel, baking is more art than science.
We bake it until we just feel, "That's just right.
" These perfectly baked pretzels are moist and steamy and ready to eat, but we can't yet.
These pretzels rest for about 10 minutes.
And then they're flash-frozen so they won't stick together during packaging.
We have a very strong, powerful freezer so that it gets hard within about a half an hour's time.
Then the trays of frozen pretzels are loaded by hand into boxes 28 per box.
Last but not least, a half-pound of bag of pretzel salt goes into the box to be added when the pretzels are reheated.
Pretzel salt is a light, airy, almost a puffed salt, you might call it.
And then it's off to the movies.
Coming up, the secret ingredient behind this old-school movie treat may surprise you.
Hey! They're not exactly a gumdrop and not exactly a gummy.
But they're colorful and fruity, and they have been one of America's favorite movie snacks since Harry Truman was in the White House.
They're Dots, and they've been going to the movies since the Golden Age of Hollywood.
In 1945, Brooklyn's Mason Candy Company first introduced this bite-size confection, and Dots joined the Tootsie Company brands in 1972.
It is unique in the world of gumdrops.
It is both one you can store in your mouth and melt it away, or you can chew it.
So what is it that makes Dots so different from other gummies? Well, it's the main ingredient.
Dots are made with starch, unlike most gummy candies, which use gelatin.
The starch is blended with sugar, water, and corn syrup.
It's all mixed up in these huge kettles then slow-cooked for about an hour and a half.
If we heat up the product too quickly, it starts to become too thick or too viscous and won't go through all the rest of our cooking process.
Once it's ready, the mixture gets divided into five separate kettles, one for each flavor cherry, lime, orange, strawberry, and lemon.
Each flavor has a slightly different amount of acid in it, and those key ingredients go into each one of those kettles.
Once all the ingredients are combined, it's time for my favorite part.
Here come the Dots.
And that happens here in the depositor.
The depositor has six vessels right on top of it.
And those vessels hold those flavors, and we fill the boards from there.
The boards are starch molds filled with hundreds of little Dots-shaped impressions.
Each tray holds about 1,000 Dots, and the depositor can fill about 30 trays per minute.
Some quick math here, and you've got more than 23 million Dots a day.
In fact, it's about 350 miles of Dots.
Right now, all of them are still pretty sticky and gooey.
To fix that, they take these huge stacks of 150 trays apiece into curing rooms, where they'll spend the night.
These are also known as hot rooms, since they are kept at a balmy The curing rooms are used to remove moisture and make them hard enough so that people can pick them up and actually eat them.
The next morning, they're hauled back out and unstacked so they form a tray of molds.
Then each one is flipped.
Uh-oh! And all those Dots come tumbling out.
From there, they go into a bucket lift and under a high-speed air jet that's kind of like a car wash.
We just blow a lot of air on them to remove the starch.
This vibrating sieve shakes some more starch out before the Dots drop through and onto a conveyor, which takes them through a cooling tunnel almost as long as a football field.
We target a certain humidity and temperature, with the whole goal of when a product is exposed to final packaging, it doesn't lose any moisture and it doesn't gain any moisture.
So, now, these little guys taste like Dots, and they feel like Dots.
But they don't have that classic Dots shine just yet.
For that, there's one more step.
They head back down a chute and into a giant tumbler.
We put a little carnuba wax on there to make them shiny.
And out they come fully-finished Dots ready for packaging.
The Dots head into the packaging room on overhead conveyor belts.
They're carefully weighed and distributed evenly into the boxes evenly and quickly.
We weigh Dots into boxes at a rate of 240 boxes per minute.
And those boxes are headed to a theater near you.
They're easy to share.
They're easy to open up in the dark, easy to pour out and just delightful to eat throughout the movie.
This is the season that Alfonso gets fat.
I don't expect everything to be handed to me.
It's not what I'm used to hearing you say.
It might actually be on a set.
Or it's real.
Which one?