Giving life to Peeps at the Just Born Factory MARK WRIGHT: My name is Mark Wright, and we're at the Just Born Candy Company. What we're producing today are our iconic Peeps chicks and bunnies that are very popular at Easter. The Peep chick that you would see at Easter time-- it's similar to the type of marshmallow you might use around the campfire in the summertime, but a little bit different texture, a little bit more flavor. But it's a sugar-coated marshmallow that is in the shape of a chick. The marshmallow starts off in cooking, where we mix all the ingredients. The last step is where we aerate the marshmallow just prior to it going to the belt, where we actually deposit that marshmallow in the shape of a chick onto the sugar bed. Once the marshmallow is deposited onto that bed of sugar, we then transport the marshmallow through a sugar chamber, where we introduce compressed air and create a tornado effect, if you will, to get the sugar airborne and to coat all the surfaces of the marshmallow in the colored sugar. After the marshmallow is coated, it then goes to the decoration area. At this point, what we're doing is we're giving the chicks there what we call their "Peepsonality," basically. Here's where we're putting the eye onto the chick. What's happening is as the chick comes under the decorating gun, there's a sensor that will detect the chick in place. And the computer will tell the gun when to shoot the decoration onto the chick. At this point, the chicks have been decorated, and what we're doing now is we're sending them up to the packaging area. So as they advance up the belt, they'll now be fed into the tray that you're used to seeing on the consumer shelf. They'll go into the tray. Each one of those trays will then be time and date stamped, so we know exactly when and where that product is produced. Once the product is put into the final package, and it's now flow wrapped, what we're doing is the product goes through the metal detector and then works over to the packaging station. Here the folks are manually packing that product into a display case. It's a display case that will go on shelf in retailers like Walmart, Walgreens, et cetera. We produce somewhere around 2 billion Peeps every year. About a billion of those are actually produced specifically for Easter. We've been producing the Peeps brand since 1953. That Peeps chick is now celebrating its 60th year.