Linkmeister

Keep the shareholder satisfied

Jelly Belly's roots can be traced back to a family named Goelitz. Two young brothers emigrated from Germany to make their mark in America and set the family on its candymaking course in 1869. Today, the great-grandsons of Gustav Goelitz are still carrying on the tradition of making candy. The Goelitz family got its sweet start making hard candies. Then the second generation of the family jumped on the band wagon of candy innovations by making what were then called "buttercream" candies. These candies carried them through the Great Depression and two world wars and included Candy Corn, a sweet we've made since about 1900 (and still use the same recipe). The great-great jelly bean ancestor also appeared in the 1800s, but jelly candies of one kind or another have been around for thousands of years. "Turkish delight," a citrus, honey and rosewater jell, has been putting smiles on kids' faces since biblical times.

Fast forward 2500 years. When the penny candy craze came along in America during the late 1800's, candy makers began experimenting with tricky sugar candies, like gumdrops, jelly beans and jawbreakers. The jelly candy inspired by Turkish delight was shaped into a bean and given a shell using a French process called "panning." Here's the science, and here's a virtual tour of the manufacturing process.

The first jelly bean was created by an American candymaker whose name has since been lost in time.

Although the penny candy boom waned a bit when America fell in love with chocolate in the early 1900's, there was a real chocolate shortage when most chocolate went to overseas troops during World War II. So patriotic Americans once again discovered their urge for non-chocolate sweet treats like the common candy store jelly beans.

The English jelly baby, it's claimed, was founded by George Bassett in 1842, Bassett's are world famous for their Liquorice Allsorts, introduced in 1899. Allsorts were not born from an inspired idea but rather from a happy accident. The story goes that one of the firms salesmen, a certain Charlie Thompson accidentally knocked his boxes of samples of liquorice sweets onto the floor in front of a buyer. The buyer, seeing the colourful mixture of sweets asked Bassetts to produce just such an assortment for him to sell. Bassett asked Charlie to name the sweets and the rest is history. Today Bassett's produce 14 million Allsorts a day and the sweets are sold all over the world, and of course at The Sugar Boy. Naturally such a successful sweet has been copied but none of the imitators come close to the real thing and we will only stock the best! Another famous line produced by Bassett is Jelly Babies; these were originally a Victorian development said to have been devised by an Austrian confectioner working for Fryers of Lancashire in the 1860's and marketed as Unclaimed Babies!

Heres info about Basset's Jelly Babies, and here's Parrs, a competitor.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 1, 2003 04:34 PM