The Jelly Belly Factory in Fairfield, California is a good place to get your kids all excited about both sugar and learning. You won’t feel so guilty about letting them dig into a bag of jelly beans, when you realize that they are also learning about food production and machines.
Smarten Up
The educational part of a visit to the Jelly Belly Factory is the free, 40-minute tour that takes you inside this working factory for a glimpse of the candy making process. You line up for the tour in the lobby area of the store, and are given paper “Jelly Belly Factory” hats to wear, uhmm, for health code reasons. You don’t ever get close enough to the jelly beans to actually drop a hair on them, as your tour guide will guide you on a walk of the factory from elevated walkways with large viewing windows. They were not at full production the day we went, but we still got to see a bit of activity in each area of production. The guide will occasionally stop, and you will be directed to watch television monitors for a short video on the history of the factory or on the production process. My son was mostly interested in watching the live process down below in the factory: the jelly beans being polished, sorted, and packaged. One of the highlights was getting a close-up view of thousands of jelly beans as they moved along on conveyor belts and dropped into sorting machines. Watching all the machines moving brightly colored candy around had an almost hypnotic effect on the kids.
Useful Tidbits
The tours run daily between 9 to 4, check the website for updated hours if you’re going on a holiday. We went the day before Thanksgiving, and had to wait in the tour queue area about fifteen minutes for our tour to start. On weekends, you will not see any, or very little, production on the tour. This might not make it as engaging, or educational, for kids. You are given a small bag of Jelly Belly beans at the end of the tour, or a chance to sample some of the flavors at the store. If you are allergic to super-sugary, energetic tour guides you might want to steer clear of this place. Be ready to hear some chants from your tour guide. Ours went something like this: the guide yells, “I say jelly, you say beans. Jelly…”, the people yell back, “…Beans!”. I thought wearing paper hats and chanting was all part of the charm of a visit to the Jelly Belly Factory. You are not allowed to take pictures or videos while on the tour, so I didn’t get a chance to capture all of that for you, but you can take a virtual tour on their website.
Santa Monica is only about 15 miles from downtown Los Angeles, but it feels a world away. We headed to the 
