For Peeps, It's A 'Blue' Easter

The color of Easter is blue this year in the heart of Peep country.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the company that makes the popular, gooey, chick-shaped, sugar-coated marshmallow Easter treats has added neon blue to the traditional yellow, lavender, pink, and white.

Peeps, the marshmallow bunnies and chicks, have been the nation's top-selling non-chocolate Easter candy for the past three years. And Greg Barratt, Just Born Inc.'s vice president of marketing, thinks of the new color as "rounding out the brand's Easter color palette."

"My father used to say in his wildest dreams, he never thought it would be this big," said David Shaffer, the company's co-president with his cousin, Ross Born.

Just Born was founded in New York City in 1923 by a Russian immigrant named Sam Born. In 1932, during the Great Depression, Born and two brothers-in-law, Irv and Jack Shaffer, moved the company to Bethlehem, Pa.

When Peeps were hatched in 1953, each was squeezed out of a pastry tube one at a time. Each eye was painted on by hand, and the candy had to sit overnight so the gelatin could harden. The process took 27 hours.

Today, it takes six minutes to make a Peep, and the company makes about 2 million daily. An estimated 600 million of the colorful marshmallow chicks will be consumed this Easter.

Creating the chicks and their multicolored bunny cousins is as much a labor of love as it is a job, company employees say. Many of the more than 400 employees are second- and third-generation candy-makers.

"I like to check them out in the store and make sure the eyes look good," said Janice Bohning, a production worker responsible for the eyes that appear on the flat marshmallow bunnies that come in pink, lavender, white, and yellow.

"When I first started, I pulled an ear off just to try it," Bohning said of the tiny bunnies. "But you look at all this marshmallow," she said, waving her hand over a conveyor belt loaded with pink bunnies and granulated pink sugar, "you're not hungry for marshmallow."

At the company's plant about 50 miles north of Philadelphia, employees sift, sprinkle, boil, stir, and shape more than six tons of sugar to make the gooey treats.

Written by Aliah D. Wright
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