1/5/2024 0 Comments Black forest candy“So technically gummy candies are also cousins of jams and jellies.”Īs for what was happening on the gummy-candy timeline, when Riegel went into business, “one of the more popular pre-gummy-bear gummies at the time would have been wine gums,” Kimmerle says. “Cooking sugar along with fruit has long been a way to preserve or store summer’s harvest,” Kimmerle says. “But both of those are typically made with rice or corn starch versus gelatin.”Īnd when your kids plead that you ought to let you them eat gummy candies instead of the rest of their pickled vegetables because they're both a kind of nutrition, well, they've actually got a point, historically speaking. “Gummy candies descend from Turkish delight and even Japanese rice candy,” says candy historian Beth Kimmerle, author of Candy: A Sweet History. But while Riegel is often credited as the inventor of gummy candy, he actually just improved upon an already successful, centuries-old, formula. Then, after a couple of years, Riegel hit upon what would prove to be a genius idea: He produced a line of soft, gelatin-based, fruit-flavored treats in the shape of dancing bears (then a popular diversion at festivals in Europe). The hard candies sold fairly well at local street fairs, but not as well as Riegel had hoped. The name of his new business was a combination of the first two letters of his own first and last names and hometown: Hans Riegel of Bonn=Haribo. His bicycle-riding wife was the sole delivery person. In 1920, Hans Riegel of Bonn, Germany, became frustrated with his dead-end job as a confectionary worker and started his own sweets company, making hard, colorless candies using a copper kettle and marble slab in his kitchen. (" There, there–eat your bag of Gold-Bears and you’ll feel much better.") Yes, it’s a rabid and ever-expanding fan base in fact, according to Haribo, if you laid all the Gold-Bears produced in a year head to toe, they would form a jiggly, tooth-decaying ring around the earth four times.Īnd to think it all started with a poor German factory worker, a bag of sugar, and a dream. Indeed, “gummies” (for lack of a better all-encompassing term defining the vast array of available adaptations on the original bear) surely have one of the most devoted followings of any candy in history to know a gummy lover is to recognize both the gleam of greedy, fiendish glee that will appear in his or her eyes whenever some new form of gummy is discovered ( "Oh my god, this store has gummy Smurfs!") and the inner peace that can only be gained from a generous portion of an old favorite. Sure, chocolate bars (and the many variations thereof) remain the top-selling treats across the globe, but how many cocoa-based snacks inspired a hit animated TV series in the 1980s (Disney’s The Adventures of the Gummi Bears), a song with over 45 million hits on YouTube ( The Gummy Bear Song), and played a pivotal role in the plot of an award-winning Broadway musical about a transgender East German rock singer ( Hedwig and the Angry Inch)? Whether you call them "gummy" or "gummi," whether you prefer bears or worms, whether your loyalty lies with Haribo or Black Forest, there’s no denying that the gelatinous, rainbow-colored candies most of us first came to know and love simply as “gummy bears” are one of the world’s most popular confections.
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