Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel Bomb here. Every Halloween in the United States, bags of triangle shaped, yellow, orange, and white candies fill trigger treat bags all over the country, and there are many bags to fill. According to the National Confectioners Association, candy companies produce nearly thirty five million pounds that's almost sixteen million kilograms of candy corn every year.
That's about nine billion individual pieces. Candy corn is a sweet replica of dried corn kernels. It's considered a mellow cream, which is a type of candy made from corn syrup and sugar that has a marshmallow like flavor. Although candy corn tastes rich, it's actually fat free, but that doesn't
mean as a health food. It is mostly sugar. Most people know the traditional candy corn with three stripes, yellow at the thick end, orange in the center, and white at the peak, but it also comes in a variety of other colors and flavors depending on the holiday. Brown, orange and white for Thanksgiving, green white and red reindeer corn for Christmas, pink, red and white cupid corn for
Valentine's Day, and pastel colored bunny corn for Easter. The traditional variety is most popular in the fall, especially around Halloween. October thirty is National Candy Corn Day. However, candy corn didn't become associated with Halloween until after World War Two, when trigger treating became popular. Candy corn has been around for more than a century. One George Renninger of the Wonderly Candy Company, probably invented it in the eighteen eighties,
perhaps because its look was reminiscent of farm life. It caught on with city folk nostalgic for a rural past, and its tricolored look was revolutionary for the candy industry at the time. The Goltz Candy Company started making candy corn in Ndred and still makes it today under the Jellybelly Candy Company name. The recipe for candy corn hasn't changed that much since the late eighteen hundreds, but the
way it's made has changed quite a bit. In the early day is workers mixed the main ingredients sugar, water and corn syrup in large kettles. Then they added fondant, which is a sweet, creamy icing also made from sugar, corn syrup and water, and marshmallow for smoothness. They then poured the mixture into kernel shaped mold in corn starch trays. They had to do this in three passes, walking backward, one pass for each color. Because the work was so tedious,
candy corn was only available from August to November. Today, machines do the work and marshmallow has been replaced with one of its key ingredients. Gelatin. Manufacturers use a corn starch molding process to create the signature design, so it's a molded candy. The molds are made by packing corn starch into frames and then stamping the kernel shape into the corn starch tip down, or a plastic mold can
be coated with a fine layer of corn starch. Either way, pumps and jet the batter into the molds, layer by layer, starting with the white tip, and the candies are left to cure for a day or two. Another machine will then shake the hardened candies out of the corn starch molds and down through shoots. Any excess corn starts shakes loose in a big sifter. Then the candy corn gets a wax glaze to make it shine, and workers package it for shipment to stores. The whole process takes three
or four days. Today's episode was written by Stephanie Watson and Katherine Whitburn and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more about candy corn, check out an episode of my other show Sabor called The Scorn of Candy Corn. It's
from November. And for more on lots of other sweet topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com and and for more podcast in my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.