[upbeat music] NARRATOR: It's our
sweetest guilty pleasure-- so appealing, Americans spend
more than $25 billion a year to experience it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! NARRATOR: Extruded,
kneaded, injected, and spun, all to satisfy our sweet tooth. Where else can you
get this much fun in a box for a quarter? NARRATOR: You'll be shocked
to learn how little sugar is in cotton candy-- and discover what substance puts
the polish on Mike and Ikes. Ever wonder how this familiar
mint gets its trademark pattern, or what special
ingredient makes a Lemonhead so sour? It's an art form. NARRATOR: Come on, indulge
yourself with more candy on "Modern Marvels." [music playing] Candy-- the mere mention of the
word can make your mouth water. I like the green one! I want the green one! NARRATOR: Americans
savor 7 billion pounds of these sweet treats each year. Face it, candy brings
out the kid in all of us, and we never outgrow our
magnificent obsession. No one knows this better than
Gino and Nick Marini, owners of Marini's Candies that
began as a popcorn stand on the boardwalk in
Santa Cruz, California. The brothers are
fourth-generation candy men, preserving the legacy begun
by their great-grandfather a century ago. Like many innovators
in the industry, they're redefining
the limits of candy making with sugary concoctions
that dare to be different. Case in point--
chocolate-covered bacon. I like chocolate,
and I like bacon. That's why I like
chocolate bacon. My cousin decided, you
know, we all love bacon-- let's go ahead and dip
some of it in chocolate. Couldn't be a bad idea. And it worked out. We've been making the bacon
for about three years now. It really has taken off. You know, the funniest part
is when we see people come in, and they're like,
chocolate-covered bacon? What's this
chocolate bacon like? Can I try some of that? And then you say,
yeah, you know, you gotta taste
it to believe it. And then you see the
look on their face when they actually taste it. And they're like, wow,
that's really good. Mmm! It's good. It's good. NARRATOR: Marini's
chocolate-covered bacon has become so popular that
Gino and Nick dip and ship an average of 30
pounds each day. Would you like bacon? (LAUGHING) It's really good. NARRATOR: Dipping chocolate
and bacon may seem simple, but the process of making it
involves some exacting steps. Each day, the brothers
cook up to 40 pounds of premium center-cut
hickory-smoked bacon, 2 pounds at a time. They don't fry it fast
in a pan but slow cook it in an oven for 35 minutes. This ensures the bacon will lose
most of its grease and gristle. According to the Marinis, that's
the key to producing the most flavor and crunch. So now we've got a--
ow, that's really hot. We're gonna take it and just put
it onto the paper towels here. Get it nice and crispy. And the longer it dries,
the more crispy it'll get. So that's basically what
we're looking for right there, a nice crispy piece. It snaps apart
when you break it. [crunching] That's pretty
good stuff right there. NARRATOR: The bacon must
cool to room temperature before it heads into the dipping
room to get its sweet chocolate shell. If the bacon's too warm,
the chocolate won't set. Too cold, and its fat juices
will coagulate, making the final product greasy. The Chocolate requires specific
temperature conditions too. This is a
temperature-controlled room. We keep the chocolates at about
102 to 103 degrees at all time. Can't dip chocolate
at that temperature. We need to get the chocolate
down onto the marble surface, temper it, and get it
to room temperature. NARRATOR: This heating
and cooling process called tempering is
the key to making the surface of the
chocolate smooth and shiny. If you try to dip with
chocolate that's above room temperature, when it dries
it leaves a white film that definitely doesn't
look very appetizing. NARRATOR: The bacon sits
on drying racks for just 15 minutes, then it goes straight
to the watering mouths of its fans. Oh, my god. That's really good! NARRATOR: But bacon isn't the
only unusual treat the Marinis love to dip in chocolate. We've tried dipping just
about anything, from insects to dried fruits to-- I mean, we'll put anything in
chocolate and give it a taste. Over the last four or five
years, the salty and sweet has been pretty popular. We take a Ruffles salted potato
chip and dip that in chocolate. You'd be surprised the number
of people we have come in and buy the chips and the
bacon at the same time. Oh, it's delicious! Thank you. NARRATOR: In increasing
numbers, candy makers are embracing the combination
of the sweet and the salty, and with good reason. Our taste buds actually
respond well to the mixture. You've got an average of 9,000
taste buds on your tongue inside mushroom-shaped openings
called fungiform pupillae. When you take a bite of
chocolate-covered bacon, its chemicals fall into the
pupillae, where your taste buds translate the chemical signals
into electrical signals to your brain. The sweet chocolate
and salty bacon combine to send an
unusually savory message. All of the nerves that are
sending messages to the brain actually work together,
so one receptor will enhance the
function of another. The receptor that's
involved with sweet kind of makes the nerves that are
sensitive to salt a little more active. The end result is that the
two go very well together. NARRATOR: One candy maker's
sweet and salty recipes have attracted the taste buds
of America's number one couple-- President Barack Obama and
his first lady, Michelle. Meet celebrated
confectioner Fran Bigelow. His particular favorite was
the smoked sea salt caramel. And then Michelle, the
gray sea salt caramel and the dark chocolate. We continue to supply the
Oval Office with chocolates. We've made a presidential
box for them, and they'll hand that out. It's been very exciting. NARRATOR: Fran's Chocolates
in Seattle, Washington, handcrafts chocolate-covered
caramels sprinkled with sea salt. To perfect her
sweet and salty specialty, Fran spent years searching
for varieties of salt with just the right
flavor profile. She discovered that gray
sea salt harvested off the coast of Brittany in France
complemented dark chocolate impeccably, and
oak-smoked salt from Wales is a perfect partner
for milk chocolate. The smoked sea salt
is softer and sweeter, so it doesn't overpower
the milk chocolate. It's sort of seamless and just
a wonderful combination with it. The dark chocolate, we need
something just a little more assertive so it perks
up your taste buds and stands up to that caramel. NARRATOR: At her family-run
kitchen facility, Fran makes between 14,000
and 18,000 caramels a day. That's about 325 pounds. Like many confections, caramel
is made primarily of sugar, and step one is to melt it. It all starts by heating 30
pounds of organic raw sugar in a copper pot. We use copper because
it conducts heat so well. Trying to completely
melt the sugar so it doesn't have any other
sugar crystals left in it. So we will stay here until
it is completely melted and let it just get really,
really dark, caramelly, almost burnt, to give it that
wonderful, wonderful flavor. NARRATOR: When the sugar
is completely melted, the caramel makers pour
it into a 20-pound mixture of caramel's other
key ingredients-- cream, lemon juice, and butter. The concoction then
cooks for 45 minutes. You don't want
the caramel ever to lose the boil as you're
adding ingredients to it. Because we're trying to also
evaporate the moisture out of this caramel to get it to a
point where you can pick it up and you can dip it in chocolate. NARRATOR: The boiling process
removes virtually all the water from the mixture,
resulting in a syrupy form of the chewy confection. It's then poured
into custom molds. After setting for 24 hours,
the finished caramels are ready to take a ride
under a chocolate waterfall. Fran's chocolate, just like
that of the Marini brothers, has undergone the
tempering process that ensures a flawless shell
that tastes as good as it looks. The chocolate has been
heated and then cooled so that the cocoa butter
crystals are all in alignment and that they will provide
you with the perfect texture in your mouth. NARRATOR: As scrumptious is
these chocolate caramels are at this point, it's the sprinkle
of salt that sets them apart. What we found is once we added
that little bit of sprinkle of salt on the top,
it just opened up the flavor in your mouth. And we went, wow, this is it. Oh, my god. NARRATOR: That's the wow
that tickles the taste buds of the Obamas and countless
other fans of Fran's caramels. Well, I got the advice
from a friend of mine to always eat it upside down
so you get the salt mix first. And that's, like, a good tip. And ever since then-- it's a really
wonderful combination. NARRATOR: Another type of
candy not only satisfies your sweet tooth but also
freshens your breath-- or does it? This factory in
Chicago churns out the number one selling hard
candy in the United States. Any guesses what it is? Here's a hint--
you'll encounter it most often on top of your
restaurant check or your hotel pillow. Say hello to the peppermint
starlight mint made by Primrose Candy. Every year, Americans
pop 36 million of these iconic favorites into
their mouths for a sweet rush and fresher breath. That fresh feeling
comes from peppermint's main active ingredient, menthol. Menthol, which
is in peppermint, is a very interesting compound
because it has two effects. One is, obviously, to clean
up and make your mouth feel fresh after the meal. But the other thing is it
actually acts on the GI tract, on your gut, to
move things along, so your stomach empties a
little more quickly and so you don't feel quite so
full and uncomfortable. NARRATOR: The first
step in the recipe is to cook a mixture of
sugar and corn syrup. MARK PUCH: We cook
it to 300 degrees to get all that water out. Now, it looks like
it's actually very fluid at this point in time
like there is water in it. But right now,
that is 98% solids. And the only reason
why it's fluid is because it's at 260 degrees. NARRATOR: After the
mixture is fully cooked, workers add the
all-important peppermint. It's so potent that all it
takes is a couple of teaspoons, representing just 2/10 of
1% of the final product. We use a natural peppermint
oil that actually adds the mint flavor. The sugar and the corn
syrup add the sweetness to it, which makes it
what you really like. Because peppermint
oil is way too strong to have without the candy base. NARRATOR: After the liquidy
syrup cooks for five minutes, workers pour in onto
a cooling table. Within 10 minutes, this
140-pound mass of goo will be transformed into
10,000 finished mints. This table has chilled
water running through it. The chilled water then
keeps the surface cool, and it will cool the candy. The candy right now, as
you see, is far too loose to be put in the machine. It needs to be in
a plastic state. NARRATOR: As soon as the
candy firms up a bit, mechanical arms knead it into
a taffy-like consistency. Then workers transfer the gooey
mass to the molding table. Here the real fun begins. A red batch of candy
cooked and mixed on the other side of the kitchen
joins the white candy mass. Then, like kids
playing with Play-Doh, they roll both red and white
sections into long strips. MARK PUCH: Right now,
they're making the stripes for the starlight mint. What we did is we took
one stripe, stretched it out the length of the table,
and then cut it in half to make two stripes. Then we took the two
stripes, stretched it out the length of the
table to make four stripes. Then when we've got
the four stripes, we stretch that out
the length of the table and cut it in threes
to make a 12 stripe. The 12 stripe's
the jacket, which he's now putting together. The jacket basically
makes up about 30% of the starlight mint, and
the center makes up 70%. And then we're going to roll
the body into the jacket and make one big, massive,
almost like a candy cane without the bend. NARRATOR: The trick
now is to thin this 5-foot-long,
2-foot-wide candy burrito into a strip with a
diameter of less than an inch. An extruding machine
handles that challenge, rolling and stretching
the mass down to a width the size of the final mint. Finally, razor-sharp blades
form the finished mints 110 at a time. They taste as good as they look,
but are they really any match for chronic bad breath? It's actually a mask. These mints, the menthol in
it volatilizes very easily. What I mean by volatilize is
that it becomes like a gas. In other words, the
molecules, the menthol, spreads in the air. And you have the impression that
you have actually cleaned up your bad smells here. NARRATOR: Experts say the
most effective countermeasure to bad breath is
proper dental hygiene. But mints can augment good
brushing and flossing habits as a quick fix when we need it. Some candies combine
that quick fix with the sweet
taste of chocolate, like the number one selling
after-dinner mint, Andes Creme de Menthe. 10 million of the
three-layered green foil wrapped candies are made every
day at this factory in Delavan, Wisconsin. There's a surprising backstory
to the familiar mountain logo and the mint's name. It dates back to 1920 and the
candy maker that created it, Andrew Kanelos. At first, these
boxed chocolates were called Andy's because
the name of the inventor was Andrew. But some people wouldn't like
to give their girlfriends or their wives a box of
chocolates with another man's name. And so they came up
with the name Andes, but spelled it A-N-D-E-S after
the Andes Mountains in South America. NARRATOR: Many details of
the Andes production process have been tightly guarded
secrets for decades-- secrets now held by
Tootsie Roll Industries. The recipe for the Andes
Creme de Menthe Thins has remained the same since they
were first introduced in 1950, and it is top secret. NARRATOR: Even so, Andes
clued us in on a few facts. The chocolate
portion of the candy is made by machines that
grind cocoa powder and sugar against each other to create
an extremely fine mixture. Each particle is only
26 microns in diameter, or about 1/1,000 of an inch. That's about half the width
of a single human hair. This is the powdered product
that comes off of the finished refiner. And we want this product to
be this fine so that you have that smooth chocolate
feel in your mouth. So we taste it to determines
if it meets our flavor profile. And we rub it on
our bottom lip as a double-check for the particle
size reduction to make sure that it's as smooth as we
expect it to be at this point. NARRATOR: Conveyors
carry the fine granules to a large blender
called a conche. Oil and butter are
added, and the conche mixes them for five hours. The result is liquid chocolate. It's the mint portion of the
candy, however, that makes Andes such a popular favorite. But how it becomes part
of the finished product is the big secret its makers
keep safely locked away. All we can say is that
it consists of a blend of peppermint oils that gives
each triple-layered candy its signature fresh kick-- that also applies for a
variation of the original candy called Andes Creme de Menthe
Parfait, which inverts the green portion that's
normally in the middle into the two outside layers. Andes isn't the
only popular candy that has a name with
a colorful history-- and it's at the center
of an unsolved mystery. Who exactly where the
enigmatic Mike and Ike? Going to the movies just isn't
the same without something sweet to munch on, and your
local cineplex couldn't survive if you weren't hooked. Candy and concession sales are
the lifeblood of the theater business, accounting
for 40% of profits. One candy contributing
to that windfall is Dots, the number one selling
gumdrop brand in the United States. These colorful treats have
plenty of colorful secrets, starting with the enormous
facility where they're made. The building was originally
built during World War II, and it was built to manufacture
Chrysler engines for B-29 bombers. [engine roaring] NARRATOR: Later, maverick
automaker Preston Tucker took over the factory,
producing the 50 cars bearing his name that became
prized collector's items. Now it's Dots rolling off
the assembly line here, a staggering 24 million
individual pieces every day. They're made from 136,000
pounds of gooey sweetness that's cooked 600
gallons at a time. Dots are made by mixing
ingredients of sugar, corn syrup, water, and starch. It makes a 6,000-pound
batch of Dots. And we make about 30,000
pounds of Dots a day. NARRATOR: Starch
is what gives Dots their characteristic
thick, gummy texture. When it's finished cooking along
with all the other ingredients, the mixture flows
into six tanks that produce six distinct colors
and flavors simultaneously. Workers add one liquid
containing an artificial color, a second an artificial flavor. They're meticulous about
matching their combos so your yellow Dot tastes
like a lemon and not a cherry. The challenge of
forming the Dots' shape starts with this
machine, the Mogul. It makes a custom mold
by filling these trays with starch, the same substance
that's in the Dots themselves. And dies come down and
make holes in the starch. And then the liquid formula
is poured into these holes to form the shape of the Dots. NARRATOR: This starch mold,
unlike one made from metal, prevents the candy from sticking
and enables easier removal and handling. 28 trays are filled every
minute, creating more than 1.7 million Dots every hour. The starch mold is still hot
at this point and about 24% moisture. The Dots are very liquid
and still hot and oozy. You actually pick them up,
and you can smear them. Then eventually,
we dry this down. But right now, it's a very
liquid molten material. NARRATOR: The Dots dry
over the next 24 hours as the starch mold
absorbs moisture, ensuring the desired
final texture. After that curing time, we
actually turn these trays over, and these Dots go on
for further processing. NARRATOR: And the Dots head
off for their final treatment-- polishing. That's the job of
this machine that looks like it was designed
by Willie Wonka called the Z blender. STEVE GREEN: The Dots, when
they go into the Z blender, have a little bit of starch
residue on them, which makes them a little bit dull. And the Z blender
removes the starch and puts a shine on them. And the shine is what gives
them the fresh Dot appearance. NARRATOR: As popular as
Dots are with moviegoers, they're not the only chewy
candies vying for top billing. Mike and Ike has been
a blockbuster hit with candy lovers since 1940. The sweet with a chewy
center and a hard candy shell was the brainchild of Just
Born, a family-owned company owned by Russian
immigrant Sam Born. He opened up a little
shop in Brooklyn, New York, and he used to put a
sign in the window that read that the candy's so
fresh, it's as if it was just born that day. And it was a play on the
name, and the name stuck. NARRATOR: But the story of how
Mike and Ike candy got its name is one of the candy world's
great unsolved mysteries. Who were Mike and Ike? Don't ask the
folks at Just Born. Even they don't know. There's a lot of mystery
surrounding how the name Mike and Ike came to be. We do know a couple of things. Mike and Ike were
popular names back then. There was President
Ike Eisenhower. There was a vaudeville
act named Mike and Ike. And we think for all
of these reasons, somehow the name Mike
and Ike came to be. NARRATOR: Today's
fans of Mike and Ike care a lot more about
what the candy tastes like than the
origins of its name. That's good candy. NARRATOR: At its
factory in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Just Born
produces as many as 70 million individual pieces
of Mike and Ike per day. That's a mind blowing
25 billion a year, or enough to fill 500
Olympic-sized swimming pools. Not surprisingly, the main
ingredients for Mike and Ikes are the same as those
for many other candies-- sugar, corn syrup, and starch. And the familiar Mogul
machine makes starch molds that form the chewy centers. Once the centers
come out of the Mogul, they come up to this area,
where they're cooled. Once cool, they'll go into
trays like you see beside me. At this point, the center is
flavorless and ready to go to the flavoring area. But it still tastes pretty good. It's very sweet. NARRATOR: Here's the place
where Mike and Ikes find their flavor, at a station that
looks more like a laundromat than a candy factory. The rotating containers perform
a process called cold panning. Inside each container are
the flavorless chewy centers to which workers
add sugar, syrup, and the all-important
color and flavors. The pans' rotating motion
causes a colorful, sugary shell to accumulate around
each soft center. They'll go through a
multi-step process of adding various ingredients to build
that flavor coating onto the Mike and Ike center. It's not even a science, per se. It's an art form,
and it's something that not everybody can do. It's watching the product
as it's being flavored so that they can
make adjustments, add different ingredients
at different times, depending on how the
product is reacting. NARRATOR: The flavors added
during this artful process range from newer entries,
like Caribbean punch, to traditional standbys,
like cherry, lemon, lime, and orange. Orange Mike and Ikes. The original. NARRATOR: Each piece is polished
with carnauba wax derived from the leaves of
Brazilian palm trees. Wax is commonly used
in the candy industry to polish all sorts
of treats and as a coating for dental floss. At this point, you can
see that the candy still has a powdery finish to it. So what we do behind me
is we polish the candy. The polishing not only gives
the center a nice, shiny look, but it also helps to
protect the candy. It keeps moisture from getting
into the candy to make it soft, and it keeps moisture from
getting out of the candy to make it hard. NARRATOR: The polished
product sets for four hours before heading to packaging. And the candy with
the mysterious name is ready for the movie theater. There's no mystery about the
name of this popular candy. But few know the identity of
the ingredient that gives it its super sour punch. They're only the size
of peas, but don't let these little yellow
candies fool you. Both soft and hard,
sweet and sour, Lemonheads prove that big flavor
can come in small packages. They've been making
our lips pucker with pleasure since 1962. The interesting thing
about the Lemonhead is its lemon shock appeal. Here is this perfectly
smooth, clean yellow candy. You are not expecting
this sort of pow from that small
a piece of candy. NARRATOR: The pow flavor
from candy like Lemonheads comes from their sourness. The sensation, when it
strikes, is unmistakable. When you eat
something super sour, the message gets to the
brain that it's sour. And you get a message back that
says, "Oh, my goodness, it's sour. We have to dilute this." So you produce an enormous
quantity of saliva. Sometimes it even
hurts when it's trying to come out so fast. NARRATOR: Puckering in
response to overly sour taste is a defense mechanism. When you pucker, you
squeeze your salivary glands to create additional
moisture in your mouth, diluting the sour candy
to make it more tolerable. As you age, your
sensitivity to sour taste diminishes since your
number of taste buds can reduce by as much as 50%. So why is it that kids,
those with the most taste buds of all, are more drawn
to sweet and sour candies? Kids love to suck on lemons,
and they love sour candies. And you scratch your head-- now,
they've got more taste endings, right? But the fact of the
matter is that they also are more sensitive to
sweet as well as sour. So for them, they can
kind of balance it out so neither the sour nor the
sweet are terribly strong. NARRATOR: No matter how
old your taste buds, you'll get a mouthful of
flavor from just one Lemonhead. The Ferrara Pan Candy Company
cranks out more than 500 million Lemonheads every year. That's about 80
pieces each second. Making them requires
a combination of hard and soft candy
manufacturing techniques. That's because each Lemonhead is
part hard candy center and part soft sugary shell. Creating the hard candy
center resembles the process for making a starlight mint. The bulk of the mixture
is sugar and corn syrup. After, the mixture is
cooked, cooled, and kneaded. 50-pound pieces are
tossed into an extruder. It rolls and pulls
them into a long sheet, about a foot wide and a
quarter of an inch thick. The sheet passes between
these rollers, where the pattern for every
spherical center is impressed, creating a matrix holding
them all in place. It will come out the chute. It will fall into
the breakup drum. It's cascading into the
breakup drum, tumbling, and it's falling into the tray. NARRATOR: Now the hard, sour
centers of the Lemonheads need their soft, sweet shells. They get them at the
cold panning station in the same process used
to coat Mike and Ike candy. The first step adds a sticky
mixture of sugar and corn syrup that adheres to the hard
centers as they tumble. In this step, Martin's adding
the color to our corn syrup and sugar mix. He will mix it in,
stir it, and use that as the glue for the
panning process. This is enough to handle
all 10 pans of candy. NARRATOR: Next, sugar adds bulk
and sweetness to each center. Ferrara Pan goes through 200,000
pounds of sugar each day. At just the right moment, it's
time to add the Lemonhead's signature ingredient-- a lemon concentrate
that gives each candy its super sour punch. When Martin added
the lemon flavor, we were standing
behind it several feet, and it was enough of an
intensity to cause everyone around to tear up. So the flavor that we're putting
on is a three-fold lemon. It's a very concentrated lemon. It's put on that way for
intense flavor impact. NARRATOR: After 45
minutes of spinning, the coated balls double in size. All that's left is a
polishing treatment with that good old carnauba wax. NARRATOR: Then they're
finally off to packaging and ready for the customer. Where else can you
get this much fun in a box for a quarter? NARRATOR: The exceptionally
sweet and sour final product has become so popular that
Ferrara Pan also offers it in apple, orange, cherry,
and grape flavors. [rumbling] [yelling] But if you're looking
for a candy that delivers a party in your mouth worthy
of a carnival or theme park, this fluffy favorite
from the 19th century is the only way to go. And you won't believe how little
sugar it takes to create it. The Italians call it zucchero
filato, meaning sugar thread. The French-- la barbe a
papa, or papa's beard. The Dutch-- suikerspin,
literally sugar spider. By any name, cotton
candy is unique. No other sweet treat looks like
a giant pastel cotton ball. It reminds us of a
simpler era, when our parents and their parents
enjoyed the very same taste at bygone carnivals
and county fairs. Part of the fun of cotton candy
is watching the candy man make it. And Nick Marini,
our confectioner in Santa Cruz, California,
has just as much fun putting on the show. This is our cotton candy
center, as you can see here. I'll go ahead and
get it started up. NARRATOR: As the sugar
in the spinning cylinder melts into a sticky syrup, it's
flung out through tiny holes. In the cool air, it solidifies
into strands and accumulates along the machine's inner walls. You want to use
a bottler's sugar. It's a little bit finer,
so the melting process happens a little better. So the trick is when you're
spinning is to keep it spinning and not let it hit the
head of the machine, 'cause the head will cut
right into the cotton candy. And then when you get
the size you desire, you can turn the heat off. And a couple more spins,
and there you have it. NARRATOR: The
cotton candy we know today was unveiled at the 1904
World's Fair in St. Louis. It was called fairy floss. A few decades later, it
was renamed cotton candy, and the rest is sweet history. It remains a popular favorite
at fairs, carnivals, and theme parks to this day. But it's also mass produced by
facilities like Charms Company in Covington, Tennessee,
the largest maker of cotton candy in the United States. Once you get started,
it's hard to stop. NARRATOR: Every batch
here consists only of sugar and artificial
coloring and flavor. The industrial spinning
process works largely the same as the one Nick Marini
uses in his candy shop. The spinner is turning
at about 4,000 RPMs at a temperature
about 300 degrees. The fluff accumulates
on the bowl. It comes out by
conveyor to the bagger. We weigh it and put it
in a bag, seal it up. NARRATOR: Since cotton candy
is virtually all sugar, you might think it's way
too much of a good thing. But an average serving contains
less sugar than a can of soda. That's because there's a
lot of air in all that fluff and only about 35
grams of sugar. It's a no-brainer that this
delicate treat could be ruined by too much heat or humidity. It's usually not an issue
when you buy cotton candy at a carnival because you eat
it immediately after it's made. But at Charms, it needs
an ideal environment to endure long enough to
reach the consumer intact. The plant's designers
licked that problem with a tailor-made air
conditioning system that rigidly maintains a temperature
of 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 28% humidity. We installed state-of-the-art
air conditioning system. We have about 250
tons of cooling. And just to give you an
idea of a comparison, a typical house
is around 5 tones. So in the hottest
part of the day, we can remove somewhere
around 1,000 gallons of water from the air. NARRATOR: The moisture-resistant
Mylar bags Charms uses for packaging also keep the
cotton candy fluffy and fresh. Its estimated shelf life-- 18 months. Not so long ago, you could only
buy fluffy stuff and almost any other candy at
your local retailer. But now you can
purchase all the sweets you want online
thanks to cyber candy shops like the Candy Warehouse. One click of your mouse
sets things in motion at its storage and
shipping facility in El Segundo, California. In this confectionery
palace, workers dubbed Candy Elves ship more
than 3,000 varieties of sweets. This warehouse is
35,000 square feet, packed full of sugary goodness. 2 million pounds are in stock at
any given day in our warehouse. We get our candy
from manufacturers all over the world, including
Asia, South America, Europe. So for instance, we
get Italian JuJubes. We have French chocolate
truffles, German gummy bears. NARRATOR: Every conceivable
candy seems to be on hand here, from the familiar
to the obscure, minty to sour, tiny
to giant sized, liquid to chunky, and
gourmet to grotesque. They've got it all. We have some very
bizarre candies here at Candy Warehouse. We've got everything from
gummy boogers, which are-- they start off sweet, and then
they're a little bit salty, just like a real booger--
but I wouldn't know that. And then we have
candy urine, too. It's a yellow sour liquid
candy that is actually quite delicious. And then we have
candy blood bags. They're red liquid blood
that tastes really good, but it just looks
like real blood. So that's a good one
for Halloween parties. A lot of times, people
will come to our website and say, wow, I haven't
seen that since I was in the fifth grade. How did you get it? And quite frankly, a lot of the
manufacturers are still around, but they might be smaller,
family-owned businesses that are not going to
carry at the chain stores. But because we
focus just on candy, we'll make sure to
carry that item. NARRATOR: The Candy Elves fill
upwards of 800 orders a day, depending on the season. In a year, they'll ship
more than 1.8 million pounds of candy around the world. And their website helps ensure
that temperature-sensitive orders won't melt on the way. We actually developed software
so that if you are in Chicago and it's 95 degrees, our website
can tell that it is going to be 95 degrees in two
days and will actually not let you ship ground. NARRATOR: As cyber retailers are
revolutionizing candy's future, they also remind us that candy
takes countless forms, each the product of imagination
and engineering. There's innovation, hard work,
and history in every bite. [music playing]
