Here's The First-Ever Look Inside The Skittles Factory
Despite the fact that you've eaten Skittles approximately 328,943,274 times in your life, you've likely never given any thought to how they're actually made. Luckily for you, Delish was recently granted the first-ever tour inside the flavor room of the Yorkville, Illinois, factory and learned some crazy things about the Skittles-making process.
Did you know, for example, that within the Mars Wrigley Confectionery, employees call the technique behind creating the candy "[making] the rainbow?” That individual pieces of candy are called "lentils?" Below, a few more things you've probably never known about your favs.
Each Skittles flavor has its own flavor-making process.
That means the recipe for strawberry Skittles is super different from grape Skittles from green apple ones, etc. There are entire research and development teams that bring these flavors to life.
The flavor has nothing to do with the color.
Believe it or not, the distinct flavor you're tasting from each Skittle you eat is not from its crazy-colored shell, but from a secret flavoring process that happens before they're lacquered. So, yes, Skittles live a brief, colorless life before they become what you're used to seeing and eating. It takes anywhere from 4-6 hours to add color to the candy.
The colorless, individual candies are known as "lentils."
In Mars world, these colorless candies exist to ensure that each flavor really, truly stands up on its own. If you can taste a colorless Skittle and know in your heart and soul that it's lemon-flavored, the good people at Skittles have done their jobs.
They'll conduct taste tests to make sure of this.
Taste tests happen as seen in the above video: in a red, low-lit room with several pairs of lentils.
"If you’ve ever eaten Skittles before and look at the color of a grape 'lentil,' you probably have an idea of what it will taste like because of your previous exposure and experience," a Skittles rep explained. "By taking away the color of the 'lentil' in this tailored exercise, we [make] it harder for someone to grab on to a visual cue of what the flavor might be before they taste it."
Not everyone is able to distinguish the flavors immediately without the coloring, but most are able to at least identify which flavors are different from each other.
Each color is produced individually.
Once they've all been made, the flavors get mixed together on a blending belt (which you can also see in the above video). That ensures you've got a good grape-to-lemon-to-green apple-to-orange-to-strawberry (or whatever flavors come in the pack you've chosen) ratio in each serving. There's no exact science to how many of each flavor end up in each pack, though. Skittles says there are 371,292 potential flavor combos in every single bag.
Oh, and though there are tons of fun Skittles packs to choose from, those original flavs remain the most popular.
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