How Are Blow Pop Suckers Made?

The raw ingredients for the candy coating are combined in large vats. These include sugar, corn syrup, coloring and flavorings. The candy is then heated and stirred to allow the sugar to melt and combine with the flavorings. This smooth liquid is cooled slightly and poured into a machine that pours the candy onto a conveyor belt, creating a long ribbon of the hard candy coating. While this ribbon is still warm, it is shaped into a long snake shape. Kept warm and pliable, the long candy rope remains in this shape so it can be wrapped around the bubble gum center.

Long sheets of white paper are cut to the length of the stick, which is about 2 1/2 inches long. These sheets are tightly wrapped around themselves with each one creating a stick. A light coating of food-grade wax is applied to prevent the paper from dissolving when the sucker is put into a mouth.

The bubble gum base is mixed with sugar and flavorings in large vats. These are then combined, and the finished bubble gum is fed into an extruding machine that creates a long rope similar to that of the candy coating. This is then wrapped around one end of a stick with a machine that also shapes the bubble gum into a sphere. These gum-wrapped sticks are then sent to a similar machine, which wraps the candy coating on the outside of it. Once the candy exterior is added, the lollipops are dropped into a cooling drum. As the drum turns, it polishes, cools and maintains the rounded shape of the Blow Pops. After several minutes, the cooled Blow Pop suckers are sent to be wrapped.

A large roll of the Blow Pop wrappers, based on the flavor being made, is fed into a machine that automatically covers each Blow Pop and twists it around the base of the sucker to keep the wrapper in place. These wrapped suckers are put onto a conveyor belt that sends them to a machine that packages them as a single flavor or a variety of flavors. These are then sent to distributors, which ship them to stores.