Most candy starts with sugar. Sugar comes from sugarcane or from sugar beets. Sugar is naturally white. So makers add color to give candy its bright look. The color is added to the candy by the makers.

Chocolate begins on a cacao tree. Its fruit is called a pod, and the beans grow inside it. Workers pick only ripe fruit, by hand, with knives. Only ripe ones give top-quality beans. The beans are also taken out by hand. Inside, they sit in a juicy white pulp.

A fresh cocoa bean tastes very bitter. It is not good to eat yet. First it is fermented, dried and roasted. Roasting gives the beans the rich taste we know as chocolate. Then the cocoa mix is made, and it is ready to be poured into molds.

The cocoa mix is poured into molds. Then it is cooled, cut and wrapped. Cooling takes time. It takes at least 20 minutes to an hour. A maker cannot rush it, so the chocolate has to sit and cool until it is ready to wrap.

For most of history, chocolate was only a drink. Hard chocolate bars did not appear until 1847. Before that year, people drank their chocolate and did not eat it as a bar. A hard bar of chocolate is a newer idea than the drink.

A jelly bean is made from sugar and corn syrup. The soft middles are shaped in trays of starch, which keeps the shape pressed into it. Then they tumble in a spinning pan. Sugar builds up on each middle and makes the hard shell. A glaze makes it shiny. One bean takes 6 to 10 days.

Gummy candy gets its chew from gelatin. Gelatin is a protein that comes from animals. It turns a sugary liquid into a soft gel. The mix is poured into holes in a tray of starch. The starch keeps the gummy from sticking to the tray as it sets.

Hard candy, like a lollipop, starts as sugar syrup. Cooks heat the syrup until it is very hot. Then the syrup is left to cool. When it cools, it turns hard. That is how a lollipop gets its hard, smooth shape.

Cotton candy is sugar spun into thin strands. A dentist helped invent it. In 1897, William Morrison, a dentist, worked with a candy maker named John C. Wharton on the first machine. Sugar can hurt teeth, so brush twice a day with fluoride toothpaste.

Words to know

• cacao: chocolate tree
• fermented: changed by germs
• gelatin: a gel maker
• glaze: shiny coating
• starch: white powder