It’s that
time of year again. Time for April showers, spring flowers, and…Peeps! Those
ubiquitous yellow marshmallow chicks that are as much a part of Easter baskets
as chocolate bunnies and plastic grass. Today we’re sharing some fun
Peepalicious facts about Peeps.
Peeps have
been around for over 60 years. They’re “hatched” in only one place on earth, at
Just Born, Inc., a candy company located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
It originally
took twenty-seven hours from start to finish to make Peeps because they were
made by hand with pastry tubes and needed hours to cool before they could be
packaged. Now, thanks to automation, Peeps can be made in about six minutes.
The factory produces
about five and a half million Peeps a day in a variety of colors, flavors, and
shapes, but the original yellow chicks are the most popular. In the course of a
year Just Born produces enough Peeps to circle the earth twice. During Easter alone,
one and a half billion Peeps are consumed, making them far more popular than any
other Easter candy. (You’d think this would make Peeps the company’s
bestselling candy, but you’d be wrong. That honor goes to Mike and Ike.)
We all know
that on New Year’s Eve New York drops a huge Waterford crystal ball to herald
in the New Year, but did you know that in Bethlehem they drop a giant Peep? It’s
the traditional yellow chick, and it flashes different colors at midnight.
Not everyone eats Peeps. They’ve become the medium of choice for
many artists who use them to create dioramas, sculptures, and paintings.
How many Peeps does it take to…
You’d need a line of 43,000 Peep bunnies in a straight line to span the Golden Gate
Bridge. It would take 1,464 Peeps bunnies stacked on top of each other to equal the height of
the Statue of Liberty, 2,664 Peeps bunnies stacked on top of each other to
equal the height of the Washington Monument, and 4,840 Peep chicks stacked one
on top of each other to reach the top of Seattle’s Space Needle.
2 comments:
My mom l-o-v-e-s Peeps! And, in an act of role reversal, I now make my senior-citizen mom an Easter basket. I have packs of Peeps in every color I can find. Waiting to go in the basket are yellow Peeps, blue, pink, and green. Am I missing any colors???? (smile!).
Angela, I think it's wonderful that you now make an Easter basket for your mom! Peeps now come in many more colors: blue, pink, yellow, lavender, rainbow, green, orange, purple, white, turquoise, and even gray and black.
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