Jelly Belly Jelly Bean Factory, Fairfield, CA

Today I bought $12-worth of jelly beans. Sounds like a lot, but they’re not just any jelly beans; their Jelly Belly “The Original Gourmet Jelly Bean” jelly beans. I became a big fan of the Jelly Belly bean after Mark and I made a stop at the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, California for a fun tour of the facility.

The Jelly Belly Candies factory is about an hour east of San Francisco. Tours are open to the public and begin every 15 minutes, approximately, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Factory workers and the candy-making machines get weekends off, but on those days TV screens set up strategically throughout the facility show the operations.

Once we stepped through the door of the place, we were in the gift shop, which was large and open; there were no walls to confine shoppers. We wandered over to test our free tastes of Jelly Belly’s new Rock candy: irregularly shaped chocolate chunks covered with a thin candy coating that reminded me of the coating on those malted candies sold at Easter time that look like robin’s eggs. We neither one cared much for the Rock candy.

The Rock candy counter was at the bottom of the stairs where we congregated for the next tour. We were each given hats that we had to wear while on tour in the food-making factory, California State law. We walked up the stairs and the tour began.

The upstairs is also open, and from that height we got great views of the Jelly Belly portraits, all mosaics done with Jelly Bellies: Princes Di, a young Queen Elizabeth, Benjamin Franklin, Larry King and, of course, our jelly-bean-loving, former president, Ronald Reagan.

Our guide led us through production—a level above—so we could see the whole operation. Not every flavor is made every day—that day the whole place smelled very cherry—but we could see canvas bins full of yellow, blue and pink beans waiting to be bagged. We learned that Jelly Belly jelly beans are flavored naturally, and that it was in the time of the Great Depression when candy shaped like crops—jelly bean, candy corn, caramel zucchini—became a mainstay. (That last one’s a joke.)

The 40-minute tour ended at the hoppers, where we saw the light, sugar coating being spun onto the beans. This area was where the Belly Flops were weeded from their more perfect siblings. Belly Flops are misshapen beans that, while they taste perfectly good, do not pass muster to receive the designation of a jelly bean.

At the end of the tour, participants received a complimentary, 100-count bag of mixed Jelly Belly jelly beans.

Before leaving, Mark and I shopped and sampled more in the gift shop, where bushel baskets held bags of different combined flavors of the candy beans. We selected two 2-pound bags of mixed Belly Flops: one to take home and one to eat during the rest of the week we vacationed in California.

Along the counter were the different flavors with helpers handing out free beans for the tasting. I tasted buttered popcorn, the number one best selling flavor, and loved it.
The two or three times a year I buy Jelly Bellys, buttered popcorn is the standard flavor I get, along with Tuti Fruity if it’s available. And I usually experiment with a third flavor because the people at Jelly Belly are coming up with new ones all the time. Today I got vanilla bean. It’s no buttered popcorn, but it’s pretty good.