What happens inside a sweet factory?

Almost every sweet factory starts the same way, with sugar and glucose syrup cooked into a hot syrup. What happens next depends on the sweet, and each kind has its own machine: see how are sweets made?

The cooking room

Syrups are cooked in large kettles, often copper. Spangler, which makes Dum Dums in Ohio, heats its batches in big copper kettles to drive off the water, and one account of a lollipop line describes vacuum cooking for about four minutes, in batches of up to 68 kg. Colours and flavours often go in after the cooking; in caramel making, for example, adding flavours earlier would burn them off: see how are sweets flavoured?

The shaping machines

• The starch mogul. Jellies, gums and other soft sweets can be shaped on a starch mogul, a machine invented around 1899 that stamps shapes into trays of cornstarch and fills them with hot gel. The trays go into drying rooms while the sweets set: see how are gummy sweets shaped?
• The drop roller. Boiled sweets such as pear drops and fruit drops are pressed between engraved brass rollers. One motorised drop roller can make up to 125 kg an hour: see how are pear drops made?
• The batch roller and puller. For rock, candy canes and humbugs, the hot batch is pulled to whiten it, then rolled into a cone and drawn out into a thin rope: see how are candy canes made?
• The extruder. Liquorice, strawberry laces and chewing gum are pushed through a shaped die and cut to length by blades: see how are strawberry laces made?
• The tablet press. Love Hearts are pressed from sugar powder under high pressure, like pills: see how are message heart sweets made?
• The lollipop press. Spangler's press shapes lollipop heads and pushes in the sticks at more than 1,000 a minute.

The coating room

Coated sweets are built up in rotating pans, a coat at a time, whether sugar shells on almonds or chocolate on raisins: see what is sugar panning? Bars and centres that need a chocolate coat go through an enrober. The items travel on a mesh belt through a continuous curtain of chocolate held at a steady temperature, then into a cooling tunnel, where most chocolate needs about eight minutes.

Finishing, wrapping and packing

Haribo gives its gummies a thin wax film to stop them sticking, and sour sweets are tumbled in sour sugar: see how are sour sweets made? Then come the wrapping machines. Spangler's wrap about four lollipops a second each, and the Wigan maker of Uncle Joe's Mint Balls has a high speed machine from Italy that can wrap up to 2,000 sweets a minute: see how are sweets wrapped?

Keeping allergens apart

Factories that make many sweets on shared lines have to think carefully about allergens, which is where warnings such as may contain come from: see what does may contain mean on sweets?

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