# What is starch moulding?

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## Summary

Starch moulding shapes jelly sweets in trays of cornstarch: shapes are pressed in, hot syrup poured in, moisture drawn out, and the starch reused.

## Description

A starch mogul is a machine that makes shaped sweets or sweet centres from syrups or gels, such as gummy sweets. Instead of metal or silicone moulds, it uses trays of starch as the moulds.
How starch moulding works
Fill the trays. Trays are filled with cornstarch.Print the shapes. The shapes are stamped into the starch, leaving hollows. Moulding starch is designed to take a clean print and to hold the shape until the sweet mixture goes in.Deposit. The hot syrup or gel is poured into the hollows.Dry and set. The filled trays are left to set. During this drying, known as stoving, the starch absorbs moisture from the sweets.Demould. Once the sweets have set, they are removed from the trays and the surrounding starch is cleaned off, for example with suction and blowing nozzles.Recycle the starch. The starch is recycled for the next batch.
Why starch?
Moulding starch does several jobs at once. It holds the printed shape and it draws moisture out of the sweets while they set. One maker of moulding starch produces it from maize and blends it with oil to reduce dusting and to stop the starch sticking to the printing mould. A little starch can remain on the finished sweets: see why are jelly babies covered in powder?
What is made this way
Moguls are used for gelatine fruit gums, starch and pectin jellies, and even fondant and foam sweets: see starch jelly sweets explained
A machine that changed the factory
Starch moguls were invented around 1899 and were in common use within the next two decades. Early machines were built from wood, later ones from steel. Before them, all of the steps were done by hand, so the machines reduced the number of jobs in sweet factories and lowered the cost of making sweets.
They also made factories safer. Starch rooms used to have dangerously high levels of starch in the air, which workers breathed in and which caused respiratory illnesses. By reducing the amount of starch in the air, moguls also greatly reduced the risk of dust explosions and fire.
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