Halloween is front and center as we prepare our costumes and ready our houses to celebrate in the safest but most fun manner we can think of and this year it’s going to take creativity to maintain the excitement of the holiday while social distancing. Some of us are spending time at home watching scary movies and popping popcorn while others are adding extra flair to their costumes this year. While we don’t expect (or advocate for) bobbing for apples, there’s still one thing that everyone gets excited for at this time of year – sweet, sour, or chocolaty everyone loves candy! And that love of confections and the connection they have to Halloween is the focus this week as we take a look at some candy facts, some stats on the favorite candies of the CFI offices and how Commodity Forwarders is keeping your candy fresh for the festivities.
The melting point of chocolate is 90 degrees, well below the temperature of the human body and while we all over a melting s’mores treat, opening a fun-size melted Milky Way isn’t the trick or treat we had in mind. Keeping confections cool while they travel from factories to retailers is a critical function of cool chain perishable shippers, including CFI. CFI distributes candy in Hawaii via our Young Brothers consolidations to ensure temp control intra-island. Chocolate isn’t the only confection that melts. Hawaii’s favorite Halloween candy, Skittles, needs to be kept cool during transit, lest fans tear open a bag of sticky rainbow mess.
Maintaining temperature is such a critical part of the confectionary world that chocolatiers around the world study the way chocolate tempers (heats and cools at different points to ensure a smooth, glossy finish) and must have the process exactly right or risk scalding, seizing and ruining the candies. Once the chocolate is properly tempered it’s not immune to other issues if it gets too hot waiting during shipment and that’s unacceptable to CFI. Our cold chain service offers the exact levels of climate control to ensure the freshest candy reaches store shelves where it waits for warm eager hands, as it should be.
