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The Gummi Worm Appeared In The U.S. A Year Before The More Popular Gummi Bear

gummi worms

Gummi Worm Day celebrates these stretchy, stringy, gummy, delicious treats.
Before we can talk about Gummi Worms, we have to talk about Gummi Bears.

Gummi Bears were the original Gummi candy created by the Haribo company in 1920. These delicious ursine candies came in a broad variety of fruit flavors and were intended for both adults and children to enjoy.

The secret to these little candies gumminess is from a careful mixture of special ingredients, the most important being the gelatin that helps to give the candy its form, and the sugar and citric acid that gives it its flavor.

From these initial gummi candies, many other types and shapes came into existence, but none of them could take the crown from the popular gummi bear. It wasn’t until Trolli created the gummi worm that this changed. Gummi worms were fun to eat, they could easily be used to create creative desserts, and were even more fun (in our opinion) to eat than gummi bears!

Gummi Worm Day was organized to celebrate the fellow confectionary monarch to the gummi bear, and the amazing Trolli company that brought it into existence. Gummi worms comes in even more flavors and varieties than the original gummi bear, including all the basic flavors, sweet and sour flavors, and our personal favorite, the sour gummi worm.

  • Gummi bears are one of the only, if not the only, type of candy to be turned into a television show
  • Gummi bears were originally called ‘dancing bears’
  • Today, gummi candy is available in a variety of shapes – spiders, watches, hamburgers, pizza, bugs, feet and more. However, bears and worms are the most popular.
  • Red is the most popular color of gummi candy
  • Haribo boasts if all the gummi bears they produce in one year were lined up head to toe, it would create a chain that would circle the planet four times.
  • America didn’t get a taste of gummi bears until 1982, when Haribo opened up its American factory in Baltimore. But Trolli, another German confectioner, finding huge successes in the American market, introduced a gummy “worm” a year earlier—a candy designed to both intrigue kids and gross out their parents. While bears are generally considered the classic, worms themselves are a wildly popular gummy standard.
  • The Guinness Book of World Records lists the largest gummy bear in recorded history as an 81-pound, 3-ounce gummy bear that stood two feet tall and two feet wide. A Sunday school class teamed up with a restaurant in San Antonio, Texas in 2011 to create the sugary behemoth.

Sources:

Days of the Year

Mental Floss 

Fun and Facts with Kids