11 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Popular Snacks

Believe it or not, your favorite childhood snacks have a ton of history. Check a couple of things that may just surprise you.

1. The Powder On Chewing Gum Is Finely-Ground Marble

It usually coated on gum to keep it from sticking to the paper lined foil wrapper. The powder makes it so the gum does not react to moisture.

2. It Is Unknown Whether The White Shark In Shark Bite Snacks Is Supposed To Taste Like One Of The Other Flavors Each Time, Or If It Is A Flavor Of Its Own

Popular belief leans towards the latter. Also interesting, the yellow shark is not the expected lemon flavor; oddly enough the yellow shark is strawberry.

3. Totino’s® Produces 1.4 Million Party Pizza® Treats Per Day

Americans as a whole eat around 350 slices of pizza each second, or 100 acres in pizza a day.

4. A Coating Found On Candy Is Made From Excretions Of An Asian beetle

Confectioner’s glaze is a common ingredient in many hard shell candies and is also the same ingredient as shellac. Shellac is actually a chemical secreted by female beetles to form sheltering tunnels as they travel along the outside of trees. It is extracted by scraping bark, bugs and tunnels off of trees in Asian forests.

5. The Proper Name For The Lucky Charms® Marshmallows Is Marbits

Marbits were invented by John Holahan in 1963.

6. Chocolate Chip Cookies Were Invented By Accident

While experimenting with ingredients in 1930 at her inn in Massachusetts, Ruth Wakefield added chopped pieces of a semi-sweet chocolate bar to her Butter Drop Do cookie dough, expecting the chunks to melt. But the chocolate only softened and held its shape. The cookies ended up being so good they had to be done again. She published the recipes in several newspapers and they became a huge hit.

7. The Original Hot Chocolate Was Really “Hot”

The Aztecs were the first to serve chocolate as a drink, but they also mixed it with hot chili pepper to make it really “hot”.

8. Popcorn Comes In Two Basic Shapes

Snowflake and Mushroom. Snowflake popcorn is bigger and pops better too, that’s the reason it’s used in movie theaters and ballparks. Mushroom is primarily used for candy confectioners since it doesn’t tend to crumble.

9. No One Really Knows When Donuts Were Invented Or Who Invented Them

Although the actual history of the donut is widely disputed, there are two common stories of how this confectionary treat came to be. One theory suggests they were introduced into North America by Dutch settlers, while another credits Hansen Gregory as the creator. Hansen, who was 16 at the time, claimed to have invented it in 1847 when he was dissatisfied with the greasiness of doughnuts twisted into various shape.

10. An 11-Year-Old Invented The Ice Pop And Kept It A Secret For 18 Years

In 1905, Frank Epperson combined soda water powder and water and left it on his porch. The temperature dropped to a record low that night and the next morning, he woke up to find his beverage had turned into a stick of frozen soda water. 18 years later, he remembered what he’d done and started producing them in seven different flavors.

11. It Takes About A Week To Make A Jelly Bean

The process as a whole is fairly involved and requires the beans to set for at least a day or two in between each step. Aside from the actual production, the sorting process can also be time consuming, since only the beans with the most desired sizes and colors will actually make it to market.

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