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Today on Weird History Food, we are going back in time to the iconic Jelly Bean company's beginnings... Oh, what a storied road Jelly Belly has taken to get to our modern age - from candy dishes at the White House itself to partnering up with the Harry Potter franchise, how exactly did it become the candy we all know and love today? How did it develop flavors that became a sort of 'tasty roulette' in the form of a board game?
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Did you ever wonder why there's a barf-flavored Jelly Belly
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Or booger-flavored? Or earwax-flavored? Or, oh, hope you aren't eating during this
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Counterintuitive as it may seem, the iconic jelly bean brand, Jelly Belly
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is just giving the people what they want. It just so happens that what the people want is pretty gross
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So, today, we're puckering up for the sweet-to-sour history of Jelly Belly
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Okay, time for a story about some magic beans. In 1869, Gustav Gerlitz started a confectionary company in Belleville, Illinois
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which he imaginatively called the Gustav Gerlitz Confectionary Company. Things took off for Gerlitz, but he was wiped out by the economic panic of 1893
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and had to sell the business to cover his debts. He died in 1901 at the age of 55, and his son Adolf restarted the business once the candy market came back
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That restarted business finally hit its stride when it started producing Mellow Creme candies
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primarily made from corn syrup, honey, carnava wax, chocolate, and sugar. You're probably most familiar with them in the form that became a big success for Gerlitz, candy corn
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The highly successful endeavor soon had factories in Cincinnati and Chicago. Inspired by the success Adolf was having, Gustav's other son, Hermann, headed to Oakland, California
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And in 1922, he founded the Hermann Gerlitz Candy Company. Now, starting a competing business sounds like a crappy thing to do to your brother
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But in those days, the candy industry was regional, so they weren't really in competition at all
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No succession-esque rivalries here. Fast forward to 1959, and Hermann's grandson, Hermann Rowland Sr., took over his granddad's company
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adding a few new products to his line, including jelly beans. Then, in 1965, he started making a new type of miniature jelly bean
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that had a flavored shell and center. Both were unusual for the time, and they made for an exceptionally tasty treat
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In 1976, candy and nut distributor David Klein stood on the shoulders of jelly bean giants
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and developed a new version of the Gurlitz Mini Jelly Bean using natural flavors
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Klein partnered up with Gerlitz to mass produce his creation, which he named Jelly Belly, in honor
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of blues musician Huddy William Ledbetter, famously known as Lead Belly. The first eight flavors were cream soda grape green apple lemon licorice root beer tangerine and very cherry Klein began by selling them out of Fossilman Ice Cream Parlor in Alhambra California
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After a successful publicity stunt in which he hired people to wait in line to buy Jelly Bellies and tipped off the press
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he became famous alongside his beans, even appearing on late-night shows as Mr. Jelly Belly
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Being Mr. Jelly Belly does sound like a lot of fun, but what sounds like more fun is being rich beyond your wildest dreams
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To that end, Klein sold his interest in Jelly Belly to the Gurlitz Company in 1980
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for about $5 million, around $18 million in 2024. And that's pretty sweet
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Once Klein was gone, the company introduced their own Mr. Jelly Belly
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an anthropomorphized jelly bean, wearing nothing but shoes, gloves, and a chef's hat
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So, wait, does that mean he's cooking his friends? What are the rules here, Mr. Jelly Belly
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Before he was president of the United States, Ronald Reagan was governor of California
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Before he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan smoked pipes. But he decided he needed to nix the habit
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That's where the jelly beans come in. Rowland heard about Reagan's struggle with tobacco
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and had some mini jelly beans sent over to the future 40th president. The result was that right around 1966
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Reagan got over his tobacco addiction. and became addicted to mini jelly beans instead
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By 1973, he was writing the manufacturer letters to personally tell them that
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it's gotten to the point where we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around a jar of jelly beans
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We owe you a special measure of thanks for helping keep our state government running smoothly
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Ronald Reagan's addiction to jelly beans was one the former movie star would take with him
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all the way to the presidency. And if you guessed Reagan's endorsement was good for business
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you guessed right. According to the New York Times, In 1980, just one year after the public found out that Reagan was hooked on the stuff, Jelly Belly became a global name, and sales doubled from $8 to $16 million a year
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Once he secured the White House, Reagan had, I kid you not, 7,000 pounds of jelly beans shipped in for his 1981 inauguration
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They were produced as a gift from Rowland, who even had a special blueberry flavor manufactured so the beans could be red, white, and blue
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By the end of Reagan's presidency, Jelly Belly had shipped the man an astounding three and a half tons of their product
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Hopefully not all at once. 2001 was a great movie and a great year for Jelly Belly It was the year that the two Gurlitz candy companies finally merged into one the Jelly Belly Candy Company At the time the company was careful to clarify that they still be making candy corn
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and the roughly 100 or so other candies they were currently selling. Nonetheless, not everyone was happy about the change
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The Gurlitz name had survived for over 100 years, and tossing it struck some as disrespectful
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But Jelly Belly's constituted so much of the company's overall business that they felt a name change was due
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and it was easy to see why. By 2008, a full 85% of their sales were Jelly Bellies
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Speaking of disrespect, in 2022, David Klein, the guy who actually invented Jelly Bellies
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sued the company in federal court. He claimed the Jelly Belly people were trying to rewrite
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the history and origin of the Jelly Belly jelly bean by portraying him as, and this is a direct legal quote, fake
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Jelly Belly countersued Klein for falsely calling himself the founder of the Jelly Belly candy company
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which, as you recall, was created from the companies founded by the Gerlitz family
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Jelly Belly further argued that Klein was using this misleading claim to bolster a CBD jelly bean business he was starting
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As of 2024, the suits have yet to be resolved. Bet you never guessed the jelly bean business was so dramatic
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For those of you unfamiliar with the Harry Potter universe, universe, Bertie Bott is a wizard confectioner who accidentally created a line of candies called
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Every Flavor Beans. True to their name, the beans come in literally every flavor imaginable
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from the delightful to the disgusting. Hogwarts headmaster Elvis Dumbledore even mentions eating
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one that tasted like vomit. A consumer never knows what they're going to get, and the risk you might
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end up eating a bad-tasting one is part of the fun, allegedly. Thanks to the magic of marketing
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tie-ins, Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans are available to us out here in the real muggle world
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They're made by Jelly Belly, and they come in a variety of flavors wide enough to make the
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fictional wizard proud. Yes, there are the standards like banana, lemon, and blueberry
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but there's also stuff like earthworm, earwax, and black pepper. So just like in the book
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there's a risk with every mouthful. Speaking of which, if you had to turn jelly beans into a
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torture device, how would you do it? While you're thinking, allow us to explain Bean Boozled
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a line of Jelly Belly specifically designed to activate your PTSD. You see, Bean Boozled
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packages jelly beans in identical looking pairs. One is a delicious flavor, the other is a flavor
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that you regret For example will that dark brown bean taste like chocolate pudding or dog food There only one way to know for sure The first edition came out in 2007 and a typical set comes with 10 pairs
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The sixth edition, for example, came with pairs like pomegranate and old bandage
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peach and barf, and strawberry banana and dead fish. Hey, Sean Evans, once Hot Ones is over
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we've got a new show for you. The packages are sold with a spinner that turns it into a game
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And there's even an app where people can play remotely. And when that whole 2020 quarantine thing hit
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people got desperate for entertainment, and the Bean Boozled challenge really took off
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Given the existence of Bertie Bot Beans and Bean Boozled, you're probably wondering how the people at Jelly Belly
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know what boogers and vomit taste like. Well, kids, get ready to hear about the worst job in the world
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Nah, just kidding. No one actually has to taste that stuff. So how do they do it
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Through the power of Smell-O-Vision. Seriously. Eh, kind of. The first step is to use a fancy whatchamajigum
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called a gas chromatograph. It vaporizes the substance in question and yzes the vapors, converting them
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from scents into flavor markers. For example, when they wanted to make a stinky socks flavor
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they threw some dude's actual stinky socks into the thingamabob, and it spit out
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a starting point for a formula. Once a jelly bean is made, it's taste-tested by executives
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then tweaked based on feedback. If you have a hard time imagining some executive saying
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this doesn't taste enough like fart, then know that Hermann Rowland himself
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sent the rotten eggs flavor back because he had once tasted rotten eggs
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and didn't think the bean was bad enough. Of course, not everything is quite so calculated
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The barf-flavored bean, for example, was originally intended to taste like pizza
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The problem was that everyone thought the cheese flavor tasted like, well, barf
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Rather than waste more money trying to get it right, they decided to go with a good-bad thing when they saw it
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Today, Jelly Belly is a global corporation with distribution in 80 countries
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At the same time, it's still a family business run by Lisa Rowland Brasher
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the great-great-granddaughter of founder Gustav Görlitz. It makes over 100 different flavors of jelly bean
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the most popular variety of which has been very cherry since 2003
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And it manufactures an eye-popping 1,680 jelly beans per second. That's enough so that a single day's product weighs as much as 24 elephants
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and they sell an estimated 15 billion of them a year. And conservatively, we'd guess around 10 billion of them
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are sold to the Ronald Reagan estate
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#Candy & Sweets