Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e09 Episode Script

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we are going pop.
From a bite-size crunchy candy with a sugary snap to a wavy chip with eye-popping taste to sticky shreds that'll make you feel like a superstar to a delicious drink filled with fruity flavors, these sweet treats will leave you feeling like a pop star.
When I was a kid, I mastered putting these poppable treats in their candy dispenser.
And you know what? I'm still a master, because I eat them every chance I get.
I'm taking about Pez, the colorful little candy that packs quite a fruity punch.
It's an icon of Americana.
It's a part of pop culture.
The pill-shaped Pez has been an obsession ever since Austrian Eduard Haas created the candy back in 1927.
Only, back then, it wasn't a candy.
It was originally created as an alternative to smoking, and a way to freshen your breath.
Haas named the mint "Pfefferminz," the German word for peppermint.
But the name was eventually shortened to "Pez.
" Americans didn't necessarily take a liking to this new product.
That's when they got creative.
They added fruity flavors to the tiny candies and began marketing them to kids.
Once that happened, it just took off and went like crazy.
And Pez is still made the same way, with sugar lots of sugar.
We use, on average, around 100,000 pounds of sugar a week.
Whew! Talk about a sugar rush.
The granulated sugar is stored in a giant silo.
When they're ready to start a batch, they convey the sugar into two separate 600-pound vats.
They grind down the sugar in a mill to create confectioner's sugar.
Then we bring it over to our Glatt machine, which is a mixer, essentially.
Here, corn syrup, color, and a few secret ingredients are pumped into the mix.
When all the ingredients are inside the tank, they start blending the batch, but not with any mixing paddles.
Instead, Pez uses blasts of hot air to mix up the ingredients.
Why? Because the hot air keeps everything nice and dry while the ingredients mix together.
It's a dry mix.
And so what we do is we want to make sure that it stays dry.
Then we have an even mix of both flavor and coloring.
After an hour of mixing, they wheel the mixer bowl over and attach it to a massive inverter, which acts like a gigantic funnel for the Pez candy.
Once they secure the mixing bowl and inverter together, they flip it upside down to fill a 600-pound tote.
Filled to the brim with fruity sugar, the batch is then picked up with a forklift and wheeled over to the press machine.
We will then hook up the hydraulics and the air hoses to it and then gently place it on top of the press machine.
And here is where the 1,200-pound blend of dry ingredients gets turned into Pez.
Just like turning coal into diamonds, the press takes the sugar and squeezes the sugary mix into perfect Pez tablets.
Essentially, it's just a powdered sugar at this point, and in order for it to form, it takes 3,000 pounds of pressure to keep that tablet in place without it crumbling.
This press can produce That's enough candy to give a piece to every person in New York City every day.
When a tote is filled with thousands of crunchy candies, they travel hundreds of feet down a long conveyer system towards the hoppers.
A mechanical arm lifts the tote onto its edge, dumps the batch into the hopper.
The hopper distributes the candy onto a vibrating belt that separates the colorful candies into single-file rows.
They're all on their side and flowing evenly to the wrapper.
Those candies follow down.
It'll give the operator enough time to inspect, make sure there are no broken candies.
If a tablet doesn't live up to the Pez standard, a worker uses tongs to remove it from the line.
Once they're all laying properly on the forming line, they continue on to packaging.
Here, they use a clever ingredient to seal their wrappers.
We use beeswax to actually seal the candy wrappers.
Beeswax? Pretty cool.
As long as I don't get stung.
Each wrapper is filled with 12 candies and sealed tight with the beeswax.
So, how many candies does that make? We're capable of running Although you can pop a Pez in your mouth straight from the wrapped pack, most people opt for one of the iconic dispensers.
As we say, to properly eat Pez, it needs to be in a dispenser.
Three Pez wrappers are placed inside a container with one of their classic toy candy dispensers.
And with over 1,200 different character heads and counting, there are plenty to collect.
The candy is delicious.
Everyone loves it.
But it's the dispenser that has the novelty associated with it, as well.
That's why, with each and every package sold, a star is born for children and collectors alike.
Just that little brick shape and little burst of flavor it's just a fun, little, timeless product.
Coming up, learn how these potato chips get their pop without any oil.
And later, find out how this sticky, chewy treat became a home run.
Hey People pop corn.
They pop rice.
But did you know you can even pop potatoes? Well, it's true.
And that's exactly what they do to create Popchips.
The Los Angeles-based company has been turning spuds into crispy popped snacks since 2007.
They came up with the notion that if you applied heat and pressure, and you popped the chip, you didn't have to cook it in oil.
So, a tremendous amount of pressure and a lot of heat together makes it pop.
Since then, the company has continued to experiment over the years to create new and innovative products.
Over the last two years, we've been working on a new ridged chip that is crispy, light, airy, and tastes very similar to that of a fried chip.
To create a poppable potato chip, they start out by using What else? potatoes.
Except, these aren't like any potatoes you've ever seen.
They're actually small pellets, which are basically potato ingredients formed into small pieces that look like rice.
We go through about of potato pellets in a year.
I'm glad they're pellets.
I wouldn't want to be slicing all those potatoes.
When they start a batch, the pellets are moved into the factory in 2,200-pound super sacks.
Each sack is dumped into a ribbon blender that gently mixes the pellets with water and oil.
The ribbon blender's about 15 to 20 minutes total just to get all the ingredients incorporated properly.
When the consistency is perfect, the pellets return to the sack and are transported over to the popping area.
Here, the individual pellets are gravity-fed into an auger system that carries the pellets up and over to the poppers.
That auger system basically takes the pellets to all 51 of our machines and feeds those machines through gravity feeding.
But these machines aren't fryers.
They're molds super-hot ones.
into each chip mold, and the metal heats up to 500 degrees.
That's the temperature that we've found that works best and optimal for the perfect Popchip.
The heated mold causes water inside those pellets to turn to steam.
The steam explodes inside the pellets, blasting them into the perfect wavy chips.
And each one is a seriously big pop.
It basically pops in a very violent reaction.
Poof.
Let's see that one more time.
When they exit the molding area, they may be crunchy enough to eat, but they still need some flavor.
The seasoning takes place in what's called a seasoning tumbler.
Most of the fried chips come out with a lot of hot oil on the outside of the chips.
What we do is we have to spray a little bit of oil on the chip to make the seasoning cling.
After their quick spritz, a curtain of tangy barbecue seasoning rains down on them.
No umbrella needed.
Just open your mouth and let that zesty seasoning hit your tongue.
Barbecue's not only one of our most popular seasoning, but it's also the most complex.
Our barbecue is very smoky, slight sweetness, and a great paprika note in the background.
After a five-minute spin, the Popchips exit the tumbler and head up a conveyer belt to the packaging area.
Clusters of wavy chips descend onto a scaling machine, where they are weighed and distributed into loading scales.
After it's weighed properly, it drops down into our vertical form-fill seal machine.
Once a bag is filled with enough zesty barbecue chips, a cutter slices the bags from the line and is heat-sealed.
Then the bags travel to the end of the line, where they are boxed up and shipped out to grocery stores around the country.
We make over 3 billion chips every day.
That is one successful pop star.
It's thin.
It's crispy, it's crunchy.
And then you get that great barbecue flavor.
The smokiness and the sweetness It's definitely my favorite one.
Coming up, discover how this bubble gum makes kids feel like a big-league ballplayer.
Later, find out how many fun facts you can learn just by popping open this fruity juice drink.
Hey I remember my first time going to the ballpark the cheers of the crowd, the crack of a bat, the smell of roasted peanuts, and popping a big ol' hunk of chewing gum in my mouth.
Nothing screams baseball like this little pouch Big League Chew.
It's been a star attraction at ballfields since 1977, when Rob Nelson invented the iconic gum.
I think that was the key to the whole thing for me with Big League Chew, was that it was baseball, it was bubble gum, it was blowing bubbles in the bullpen or out on the field.
Over the decades, adults and kids alike have been chewing and popping these shreds of gummy goodness to feel like a major-league ballplayer.
And each perfect pouch of pink gum starts in the Big League Chew factory in Upstate New York.
First, workers measure and mix flavoring, colorants, and softeners before moving on to the ginormous mixer.
The majority of the materials are added at the mixing step itself.
Here, thousands of gum-based pellets are added to the mixer, along with the previously mixed ingredients, and over 7 gallons of corn syrup.
It's a lot of gum.
Each batch is 1,000 pounds.
There are two opposing paddles within the mixer, and given that it's a chewing gum, as it mixes, it makes the snapping, chewing sound which normally you would hear coming from a mouth, but on a lot louder scale.
Man, I could blow one heck of a bubble with all of that.
After 45 minutes, the batch is starting to look like a big wad of gum too big to handle.
So they empty the sticky batch onto the cutting table.
Here, they coat the outside of the gum with some cornstarch.
Then a worker takes a slicer and hand-cuts the gum into 25-pound blocks.
Those 25-pound blocks are put on a transfer cart.
That cart is then taken into a forming area.
A skilled operator hand-feeds each block of gum into an extruder.
Here, it joins some extra gum pieces, and then all that gum squeezes through a set of sizing rollers that flattens it down to 3/8 inch.
Also during the course of the process, we add a lot of cornstarch.
It keeps the gum from sticking to the rolls, and it gives that dusty baseball-park experience to the gum itself once it's shredded.
At the moment, the gum is only 3/8-inch thick, but that's not thin enough.
So the gum travels through a series of four rollers that compress it down even further to 1/16 inch and scores it, creating grooves in the sheet of gum.
The scoring of the sheet allows a perfect amount to be in each pouch.
It's scored in five areas to yield six cards per sheet.
As the sheets exit the scoring area, a worker hand-separates the sections of perforated gum and stacks them onto curing trays.
Each tray holds 12 sheets that are rolled into a curing room, where they're left for 12 hours.
It's still about and too soft to handle.
It's like handling a wet lasagna noodle.
So, the curing itself gives it more rigidity.
It begins to help dry it and firm it up into that gum-handling texture.
When the gum reaches 63 degrees, it's firm enough to shred.
To get the shreds, we move the gum from the curing section, and we load those two cards into a shredder.
But that's a trade secret.
No matter how they do it, you can see the results for yourself.
Perfect, little, sticky shreds of gum.
The paper shredder in my office doesn't kick out anything nearly as tasty as this.
The shreds that were developed for Big League Chew are just perfect, in that they don't stick together, and just, to me, it makes me feel like I'm 11.
Once the gum is shredded, it travels onto a conveyer to the packaging area, where premade pouches are ready and waiting.
One pouch is filled and sealed every second.
We produce about 80,000 Big League Chew pouches per day.
The pouches are then stacked into trays of 12 that you'll find on the shelf of your local market or in the stands at your favorite ballparks.
There's an iconic connection to the baseball park.
You rip open that pouch, you can take a little, you can take a lot, you can stuff your mouth with it.
Kids like that.
Got to love that pop.
Coming up, find out how you'll learn a new fun fact every time you pop open one of these classic bottles.
Hey Lots of drinks make sound when you open them champagne, beer, soda cans.
But there's one sound I can't get enough of.
That pop sound can mean only one thing Snapple, made from the best stuff on Earth.
Their classic tops have been making customers smile since 1972.
So, the cap is essential to the Snapple experience and making sure that, in the process, we get that crisp pop whenever you open it.
Three Brooklyn friends who started making juices from natural ingredients created that iconic pop.
And the name Snapple came from one of the most popular drinks, called Snappy Apple, and it go shortened to Snapple.
Today, Snapple sells over 40 varieties nationwide, including everything from peach tea to Snapple apple.
But one of their most popular flavors comes in that famous pink hue.
Kiwi Strawberry kind of draws your eye.
The perfect mix of sweet and kind of tangy.
That sweet-and-tangy taste starts here in the Snapple factory.
Inside a massive they pump in the first of three major ingredients Kiwi Strawberry concentrate.
Then they add a touch of sweetness.
Actually, more than just a touch They use over 100 pounds of sugar in each batch.
We send in our coloring, which is called "blush," to give that pink pop for Kiwi Strawberry.
It already looks good enough to drink.
Once those ingredients are mixed thoroughly, they add 6,200 gallons of water into the tank to start diluting the concentrated blend.
We have an agitator in our holding tanks to make sure everything's mixed together properly and we keep a certain viscosity.
By now, the liquids have been thoroughly mixed and turned into a syrup.
The syrup is still highly concentrated and not quite ready to drink.
To do that, they need to pump the syrup to the other side of the factory.
We use air to transfer our product through our miles of pipes.
Think of all that fruity refreshment tunneling through that maze of pipes.
I wish I could install it in my ceiling.
When the syrup arrives at the blending skid, it goes into one of two tanks situated next to each other.
One holds the syrup, and the other holds water.
It automatically takes so many parts of water to so many parts of Kiwi Strawberry concentrate, and then it blends it together.
But it's still not ready to touch your palate just yet.
After the blending skid, the liquid is pumped into a pasteurizer that heats it to 190 degrees.
Our pasteurizer makes sure that everything is safe and quality before we start filling into bottles.
Now that the juice is prepped, it's time to get the bottles ready.
Everybody knows the Snapple glass bottles.
You can spot them out anywhere.
The first step for the bottles on this massive is turning them upside down.
As the inverted bottles ride the conveyer, nozzles inject air inside the glass to remove any debris.
Then it's time for a little shine.
Then it goes through our steam tunnel, which is then cleaning the outside and the inside of the glass.
Now that the bottles are sanitized, they're ready to be filled to the brim with fruity juice.
The filler has 72 valves that inject the Kiwi Strawberry liquid into the bottles at the rate of 500 per minute.
I could watch this all day long As long as they let me grab a bottle from the end of the line to enjoy while I'm watching.
Once the 16-ounce bottles are filled to the brim, they run through a topper that gives them their classic pop cap.
Capped and ready, the bottles travel through a warmer-accumulation machine, which is misleading because it actually cools the juice from 185 degrees to about 85 degrees.
Usually spend about three to five minutes in the warmer to bring down the temperature.
Finally, the bottles get their Kiwi Strawberry label before being boxed up and shipped out to supermarkets and vending machines around the world.
Everybody knows, when you pop open a cap of Kiwi Strawberry, you look under there, and we have our fun facts.
Snapple started adding them to the caps in 2002, and since then, they've used over 1,000 different fun facts.
We have consumers that actually collect all the caps and try to get all of the facts.
Huh.
Did you know that jousting is the official sport of the state of Maryland? Who knew? Just lower that chip just a little Did you hear that? Crazy.
Bang-bang, chicka, bang-bang Got to love that pop.