My recent visit to San Francisco unfortunately coincided with the Wine Country wildfires, so I had to pivot on some of the excursions I was planning on doing with my mom while my sister was working. Particularly I tried to think of things to do that were indoors to avoid possible poor air quality. One of the destinations that I ended up choosing to take my mom was the Jelly Belly Candy Company, and try out their free Jelly Belly Factory Tour and do some shopping for candies she could take to relatives in Thailand. It was more of a trip for her since she loves candy, but I think I ended up having just as much if not even more fun. It was much cooler then I thought it would be for someone like me that loves the idea of sweets but doesn’t love eating sweets. There’s a lot that go into making a Jelly Belly bean!
The location of the Jelly Belly in the Bay Area is out in Fairfield, which is north towards Napa, and also happens to be across the street from an Olive Oil and Vinegar tasting room and also the Budweiser Tasting Room, so you can make this a productive day excursion for the one hour drive. If you’re staying by Napa, consider it to take a break from wine. We only stopped for the Jelly Belly Factory Tour, which I’ll share here.
It’s best to visit on a weekday because then you’ll see the machines working with the people running them, vs when it is not operating on weekends or holidays. Overall, I recommend going to the Jelly Belly Factory Tour because it is cool to learn how the jelly beans are made and prepared for sale, and Jelly Belly really strives for a mix of efficiency with machinery but also relies on people for quality every step of the way. The workers seemed happy – several waved at me and smiled, and I’m not a cute kid on a tour. Though I think the paper hats they require you to wear the whole tour are both silly (so non functional) and cute.
I am all for technology and progress I don’t believe it means completely displacing people out of jobs, though it may mean changing the job description to work with the technology. As fascinating as automation is, seeing it paired with people too is heartening – and if you come on a working factory day you’ll be able to watch that interaction.
The tour is upstairs and run frequently, spaced out at 10 minutes or so depending on how busy it is. The tour is a self-guided one, so you can take your time or go as fast as your interest is. Everything is all indoors in hallways above the factory floor with signage and videos on a TV to provide information as you look down through windows into the work being done below or have trivia on the inside walls. Most of the videos are short, 1-2 minutes each.
One of the best gift sets I think is not a bag of jelly beans where you guess which of the 50 flavors you just ate, but the 50 flavor box set which labels and packages each flavor in its own area. They have a special area where these are packaged which you can see early on in the factory tour and a video showing the rainbow… it’s hard to believe before this was automated in the machines you see below that it had to be scooped by hand, each flavor at a time, in each individual box, by a person.
There is also an area of jelly bean art, which a video explains the beans are placed by chopstick by hand. You also learn about Ronald Reagan’s love for the jelly beans here (he fell in love with them when he gave up smoking), including providing a special jelly bean jar with the presidential seal that President Reagan gave out to visiting dignitaries and heads of states. And, he sent Jelly Belly as a surprise to astronauts in space. The first Jelly Belly jelly bean art was in fact also of Reagan.
A few other presidents also graced the hallway in jelly bean art form
One hallway was full of trivia and you could push the red button to “smell” a hint of the flavor of the correct jelly bean answer.
In the windows as you sniff your way down the hallway, you see man and machine working to package multiple flavors into hat appeared to be BeanBoozled Mystery Bean Tins. I have never buy these weird and sometimes gross flavors myself but I know they appeal to some – think flavors like Spoiled Milk, Stinky Socks, Toothpaste, Rotten Egg or Canned Dog Food. Trying single beans where I knew what I was getting later in the Sample Bar is enough for me (I still didn’t request any Bamboozled flavors though).
You’ll also see where jelly beans are layered with flavor and polished, all done while tumbling round almost like in an open dryer. The rows and rows of pods of them seem like you’re in a space ship of some sort.
Or see a factory worker mix up a batch of flavor – ha ha I was a little surprised though I shouldn’t have been on how many pitchers of sugar was being added. This just shows my ignorance as I never make dessert or bake. There is another area that doesn’t allow photos where you can see the molds for the candies that create which include more then the Jelly Bean round shape, and how they first create an intense flavor center and then add a second shell around it.
As you turn around in the large circuitous route over the factory floor, you will encounter so many pallets of the jelly bean colors around various corners in various palettes (see what I did there) resting / sleeping before being packaged.
Here’s a glimpse of the pallets of Jelly Belly and also the parade of boxes as they get ready to be shipped off in one of the areas.
This area here shows jelly bellys after being created then being picked up by the pallet by the machine, and then sorted out so no defective looking ones go into the line to be put into boxes for the consumer. This is one of the prime examples of how Jelly Belly uses the cooperation of machine and humans. Right before this window is a fun station with a computer game where you can compete with a friend on virtually sorting messed up beans from a moving conveyer belt to get a taste of his role.
And here’s a bunch of jelly bellys that are going to be mixed into the assorted flavor packages.
After the factory tour, or before it if you’d like, they have a Sample Bar where you can pick 3 different Jelly Belly flavors to sample for free. After your three, you can go right back in line to get three more and three more… like I did. They have all the flavors here which you can purchase by the quarter pound and make your own mix. At the end of the tour you are also gifted a free sample bag of jelly beans. At the gift ship, look for the deeply discounted Belly Flop bags which are the slightly deformed looking but just as tasty jelly beans that got sorted from the final packaging.
If you’d like, you can have lunch here at the Jelly Belly cafe or Snack Cafe or some of the candy machines to get more jelly flavored treats. I didn’t try these, but the menu includes jelly bean shaped pizzas and burgers. Also in this area is an additional discounted gift shop. There is another area upstairs where for a fee you can take a chocolate and wine flight.
Besides Fairfield, the other location you can go on a Jelly Belly Factory Tour is their Wisconsin factory. Overall, including time in resampling at the Sample Bar and shopping in the gift shop we were here for 1.5-2 hours. We were probably longer then other visitors as I liked watching the line work and so would watch for a while at different interesting points. The entire tour walk is reportedly about 1/4 mile.
Would you visit the Jelly Belly factory? Or what candy or creation do you want to see the factory tour behind? 
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