ISM & ProSweets 2025: Jelly Belly Germany talks flavors, production, and regulations
06 Feb 2025 | Jelly Belly
Jelly Belly’s sales manager for Germany, Uta Worbes, tells us about the US company’s latest products at ISM & ProSweets 2025. She highlights the 50 flavors available on the European market, including the seventh edition of the Bean Boozled Challenge and the new bubble tea-inspired varieties. Jelly Belly has two production plants, one in the US and one in Thailand, to ensure regulatory compliance based on region.
Hello and welcome.
This is Milana with Put ingredients first at ISM and Brucews Cologne 2025, speaking to Uta Vorbs, sales manager at Jelly Belly for Germany.
Could you tell us a little bit about the products that you're showcasing this year?
Yeah, we are responsible for Jelly Belly beans and so there are like 50 different flavors that we showcase, so everybody knows Jelly Belly from the childhood, from theme parks.
Everybody has got a favorite flavor that they all like to get and so yeah, we are showcasing all of our flavors, really colorful, lots of really great ingredients, natural ingredients as much as we can.
But we also showcased like the 7th edition of Beanboozled.
I don't know if you know the Harry Potter stuff, so this is like the game where you don't know what you get, if you get a good flavor or a weird flavor.
So this year you can try and maybe you want to try.
It's wet, dark, and it's burnt rubber, so it's it even got weirder.
Also really interesting is what we have here would be the bubble tea flavors.
So that's something that people really like.
If you make new flavors, sometimes you think it's going to be great and it's like, OK, this is OK, but bubble tea was something that really hit something major, so that's nice.
And what's your inspiration for your range of flavors?
Is there any trends that you are noticing that is inspiring?
Actually, really, the bubble tea is really inspiring, so we always look worldwide what's going on.
But then we also have flavors that are like all-time favorites, and you also have in different countries you've got different major flavors like for instance, in America it would be the bubble.
The butter popcorn and the berry cherry.
In Germany, everybody loves to, so that's actually really different.
And could you tell us a bit about your ingredient sourcing and production process?
Actually, to produce a jelly belly bean, it takes up to 21 days to make it, and the big difference to other jelly beans.
Is that we have the same flavor inside the bean and in the coating, so that's really a big difference, and also makes the, yeah, the quality of bean really high and then we also use, we use different, we, we got two plants that we produce our products, so we got one in America where we have a little bit different ingredients and like for Europe we have.
European compliance that we have to meet, so we do this in Thailand.
So are there any regulatory challenges you face, whether here or abroad?
We always try to be up to date and just try to be as sustainable as we can, try to use as many natural ingredients as we can, but on the other hand, I always say it's the sweets.
We are.
You know, it's, it's sugar.
It's, it's fun.
It's sometimes I say, we are responsible for the fun in life.
And so that's a nice sentiment.
Is there anything else that you would like to highlight?
Maybe just, yeah, the colors, the flavors, the show is really great, and , and there are always kids growing up with Jelly Belly and always remembering the first time they had it, and it's really nice to work for a brand where people know the first time that they ever had it.
It's something very unique and it's, I'm really proud to be working for a company like that.
