Sugar Quiz: How Are M&Ms Made?

25th June 2011

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Sugar Quiz: How Are M&Ms Made?

If you’re anything like us, you love a good sugar fix now and again whether it be in the form of one of Francois’ mouth watering Doughnut Vault doughnuts, or a fist full of M&Ms. And speaking of M&Ms, we’ve long wondered: how are M&Ms are made so perfectly round and candy coated? Turns out we’re not alone in our pondering. The old M&M riddle is even allegedly asked in job interviews at tech companies. So we turned to the trusty internet to find the answers to our query. And the process, we discovered, is courtesy of madehow.com.

The story goes something like this: Way back in the day, chocolates were melting and not really very transportable, so in 1940 Forrest Mars, Sr., who formed M&M Limited in Newark, New Jersey, came up with the idea to create a sugar candy coating that would prevent his chocolates from dribbling into puddles in the pockets of small children and soldiers sent abroad.

M&Ms’ have two main components, hardened liquid chocolate and the hard candy shell.

-The liquid chocolate is poured into tiny molds to create the chocolate centers of the candy.

-After the candies are formed, they are “tumbled” to make the chocolate center smooth and rounded. Then they are allowed to harden.

-When the chocolates are hard, they are transported via conveyor belt to the coating area, where the process called panning is performed.

-During panning, the chocolates are rotated in large containers as liquid candy made of sugar and corn syrup is sprayed onto them. The coats are sprayed on rotating chocolates at timed intervals. These intervals allow each coat to dry. Each coat leaves an even layer, a shell, of dry candy substance. The chocolate centers receive several coatings to ensure a uniform, complete coat on every piece.

-The color is added to a finishing syrup and applied as the final coat. Each batch is a different color. Finally, the liquid candy dries into the hardened shell.

-The single-colored batches are combined into the mixtures of red, yellow, blue, green, brown, and orange. They are then transported to the machine that stamps the “m” on the shells. A special conveyor belt carries the pieces to this machine. Each piece rests in its own indentation. The piece runs under rubber etch rollers that gently touch each candy to print the “m.” This machine is specially designed to imprint the “m” without cracking the thin candy shell. The process used is similar to the off-set printing process. Approximately 2.6 million M&Ms’ are transported to the etching machine per hour. One hundred million individual M&Ms® can be manufactured per day.

A few interesting ratios: Plain M&Ms’ are proportioned (approximately) as follows: 30% brown; 20% yellow; 20% red; 10% green; 10% orange; 10% blue. Peanut M&Ms’ are 20% brown; 20% yellow; 20% red; 20% blue; 10% green; and 10% orange. Peanut Butter Chocolate M&Ms® and Almond M&Ms® have even proportions (20% each) of yellow, red, green, blue, and brown.

Read more: How m & m® candy is made - l http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/M-M-Candy.html#ixzz1Q8ji1Z6I