The largest gummy bear in the world does not come from America or China, but from Oosterhout. Candy machine manufacturer Tanis unveiled the mega gummy bear measuring two by two meters on Thursday afternoon. The candy weighs more than 1700 kilograms. The company is now in the Guinness Book of Records.
Tension was high in the production hall in Oosterhout on Thursday. A team of more than twenty people has been working on the huge gummy bear for the past few weeks. It was cast in a mold the size of an enormous jacuzzi.
“The attempt was only successful if the bear remained lying down for five minutes.”
Actually, the gummy bear was supposed to be removed from its mold last week. But then it turned out that the bear was not yet properly cured. So the record attempt had to be postponed. “We saw that the core was still much too hot. And the attempt was only successful if the bear was hard, edible and remained on the plate for five minutes,” explains marketing director Wouter Tanis.
So Thursday was attempt two. The huge orange gummy bear was removed from the mold. Hard enough this time. The Guinness Book judge carried out an inspection and then came up with the redeeming words: record attempt succeeded. The gummy bear weighs 1728 kg. This means that the old record from Iran, which stood at 1200 kg, has been broken.
“We really still had our doubts whether it would work.”
Huge relief from Tanis gummy bear team. “We are very happy. Because we really still had our doubts whether it would work,” says Wouter. “Normally we make little gummy bears, but this is unfamiliar territory. We suddenly had to take completely different factors into account and you can’t measure everything. So we are very happy that it worked out.”
The candy bear will now first go to a trade fair in Germany. Then the gummy bear returns to Oosterhout. Then it will be distributed among the enthusiasts. Because a condition for keeping the record is that the ‘candy’ is actually eaten. It is not yet known exactly how the company will organize this, because that will also be quite an operation. In total, about 850,000 standard gummy bears fit in this large variant.
