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, Digital Spy's US sister site Delish was recently granted the first-ever tour inside the "flavour room" of its factory in Yorkville, Illinois, and learned some rather crazy things about the whole Skittles-making process.
Did you know that, within the Mars Wrigley Confectionery, employees actually call the technique behind creating the candy "[making] the rainbow?" And that the individual pieces of candy are called "lentils"?
Below are a few more things you probably didn't know…
Each Skittles flavour has its own flavour-making process.
That means the recipe for strawberry Skittles is entirely different from orange Skittles from green apple ones, etc. There are entire research and development teams for each.
The flavour has nothing to do with the colour.
Believe it or not, the distinct flavour you're tasting from each Skittle you eat is not from its coloured shell, but from a secret flavouring process that happens before they're lacquered.
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So, yes, Skittles live a brief, colourless life before they become what you're used to seeing and eating. It takes anywhere from four and six hours to add the colour.
The colourless, individual candies are known as 'lentils'.
And if you can taste a colourless Skittle and know in your heart and soul that it's lemon-flavoured, 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 colour of the 'lentil' in this tailored exercise, we [make] it harder for someone to grab on to a visual cue of what the flavour might be before they taste it."
Not everyone is able to distinguish the flavours immediately without the colouring, but most are able to at least identify which flavours are different from each other.
Related: Cadbury wants you to help it make a new Dairy Milk bar
Each colour is produced individually.
Once they've all been made, the flavours get mixed together on a blending belt (which you can also see in the video). That ensures you've got a good lemon-to-green apple-to-orange-to-strawberry (or whatever flavours come in the pack you've chosen) ratio in each serving.
There's no exact science to how many of each flavour end up in each pack.
Skittles says there are 371,292 potential flavour combos in every single bag. And though there are tonnes of packs to choose from, the original remain the most popular.
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