Exclusive: Finished product market continues to thrive in 2025

Friends roasting marshmallows at the beach. Pic: Adobestock
As market results have shown, the global confectionery sector is thriving, with a number of segments including the jellies and gummies market enjoying notable success. Confectionery Production explores key trends, new products and technology developments. Daisy Phillipson reports
The global jellies and gummies sector has recently stood out in witnessing significant growth in recent years, and this is set to continue.
According to recent data from Grand View Research, the market size was valued at $38.18 billion in 2024 with a projected CAGR of 3.8 per cent from 2025 to 2030. Drivers include versatility, convenience and the ever-growing functional and fortified gummies segment.
Social media platforms have played a pivotal role in shaping buying behaviour and accelerating sales in the jellies and gummies market, particularly among younger consumers. This has also been notably true of other segments including for chocolate (with the recent Dubai chocolate phenomenon), and for sharing products like marshmallows, gum and other novelties. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have amplified the appeal of visually vibrant and uniquely shaped products, turning them into shareable content that fosters viral trends.
A few years back, the fruit jelly boom, sparked by the ‘jelly fruit challenge’ on TikTok, led to an unprecedented spike in sales. Ju-C Jello Bags went from being a dollar-store product to a hot commodity, selling out in stores across the US. More recently, TikTok has boosted demand for products such as peelable fruit gummies and Sprite-frozen gummy bears. Sour candies have also become a phenomenon, largely thanks to their compatibility with viral social media challenges and the thrill of extreme sensory experiences.

pic: Adobestock
These trends demonstrate the power of user-generated content in creating demand and enhancing brand visibility. For manufacturers, they highlight the importance of adaptability and staying ahead of the curve.
Pioneering product innovation
Innovation in the jellies and gummies sector remains robust, with companies like Haribo leading the charge. As a market pioneer, the candy company continuously pushes the boundaries of product development, introducing fresh and creative concepts globally to ensure it stays ahead of consumer expectations.
In April 2025, Haribo will launch the My CityTrip and Berry Clouds varieties – two new products that are exclusive to travel retail. The 700g bag of My CityTrip jelly candies come in the shape of 10 major European landmarks, with flavours including lemon, strawberry, orange, blueberry, raspberry and apple.
Meanwhile, the 650g resealable pouches of Berry Clouds foam gummies are cloudshaped with blueberry, wildberry and strawberry flavours. Another confectionery manufacturer that knows how to tap into TikTok’s viral culture is Trolli, with the brand’s products known for their neon colours, bold flavours and rule-bending approach to sour gummies. This year, Trolli launched its new frozen Gummi Pops and they swiftly went viral thanks to their frozen gummy texture and amusing appearance.
Amid the trend of visually captivating and texture-rich treats that resonate with younger audiences, the freeze-dried candy phenomenon has gained traction, with consumers and small businesses alike experimenting with freeze-drying popular jellies and gummies to produce light, crispy and intensely flavoured snacks.
According to Grand View Research, the global freeze dried candy market size was estimated at $1358.8 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.5 per cent from 2024 to 2030, demonstrating significant opportunity in this growing subcategory. Many suppliers have been tapping into the craze, including soft candy company Bebeto.
Bebeto’s ‘Freeze Crunchy’ range comprises a variety of freeze-dried versions of its classic gummy products, including marshmallow rainbow twists, peach rings and watermelon slices. Said to be the first major brand to bring a freeze-dried line of its own sweets straight to UK shelves, Bebeto created the new products by freezing gummies and marshmallows and removing the liquid via vacuum, creating a light, crispy crunch with intense flavours.
Freeze-dried candy specialist Sow Good Inc. released a series of new seasonal products, including freeze-dried holiday marshmallows, taffy bombs and chamoy coated candies such as peach puffs, sweet bears and sweet worms. As well as trend-setting concepts, consumer appetite for vegan, free from and low sugar products has been driving jellies and gummies NPD. Last year, Confectionery Production highlighted candy brand Rotten’s Gummy Worms, which come in eye-catching, compostable packaging and contain 60 per cent less sugar while promising the same great taste.
This year, the company updated its recipe to launch ‘Rotten 2.0’. In addition to achieving a chewier, softer texture, Rotten’s Gummy Worms promise six flavours in every bag with a stronger punch, allnatural colours, a boost of protein and fibre, even more sourness and new packaging to keep the candies fresher. For its part, Savvy Sweets introduced its range of naturally-flavoured sweet treats that offer benefits for gut health, as well as a low glycaemic index and minimal calories.
The initial UK launch included four flavours: Sour Bears, Sour Cola Bears, Berry Bears and Fruit ‘n Cream Bears. All of these are made with plant-based sweeteners, stevia and erythritol, as well as FODMAP-friendly prebiotic plant fibre and pectin.
In response to consumer interest in plant-based versions of premium candies, Candy Kittens launched its new product Wanderlust. These vegan, gourmet sweets are double layered, foamy and gummy chews that are said to be bursting with fruity flavours including strawberry, orange, blackcurrant and passion fruit.
The growing variety in NPD highlights not only the importance of creativity and trend awareness but also the need for manufacturers to remain agile in their production processes. Flexibility in machinery is essential to accommodate diverse formulations, textures, and shapes, ensuring brands can keep pace with shifting preferences.
As emphasised by Carsten Butz, technical director at machinery specialist at Germany’s WDS, “Confectionery manufacturers need to respond quickly to market trends and launch various quantities of new products to the market. To achieve this balancing act economically, flexible production solutions are required.”
WDS offers plants tailored to all production capacities, from lab-scale setups to high-output lines for large-scale confectionery manufacturing. This adaptability extends across its product range, with machinery designed to produce a wide array of confectionery types, including jellies and gummies. The portfolio enables nearly endless combinations of shapes, fillings and colours, meeting diverse production needs. “WDS plants have a modular design,” adds Butz.
“This enables the expansion of existing plants to meet changing production requirements. The use of Easy Clean equipment also helps to minimise downtime and reduces changeover times, to meet customer demands for more and therefore smaller batch sizes.” Additionally, WDS is able to offer customers a broad range of digital services via the SweetConnect platform.
Flexibility for functional confectionery
In the production of soft chews, chewy candies and toffee, Hänsel Processing and its partner Proform highlight the need for processes such as curing, maturation or crystallisation.
These steps traditionally require several hours to a full overnight period. During this time, the batch must be transferred to storage units, moved away from the production site and later returned for final stages like forming, cooling and wrapping, depending on the product type. However, the adoption of a Unibatch or continuous cooker for chewy candy followed by an Intruder can replace these steps before the forming process.
Christian Gand, Proform’s MD, explains, “An Intruder, installed directly after the cooker, can cool, grain or crystalise, add in ingredients and extrude several ropes, feeding down-stream forming lines. “One machine, our Intruder, replaces traditional production equipment: a cooling drum or cooling belt, as well as a pulling machine or a Z-blade mixer.
This machine produces continuously, eliminating traditionally required intermediate product storage and handling for curing or maturation. “Directly after forming, the finished products can go directly through a cooling tunnel to our client’s wrapping machines or to flow packers, as required by the process,”
Gand continues. While the Unibatch cooker is ideal for smaller capacities, Hänsel Processing also offers the Crossflow cooker for larger quantities. With efficiency in mind, the Intruder requires no cleaning for shutdown and restart when running the same product, even after several days of downtime or more. Flexibility is another key benefit, as an online changeover is possible thanks to a pre-programmed procedure that minimises product loss and enables the switch between products within less than three minutes. Following this process, the partners offer a range of forming equipment for different needs, including ball forming and cut and wrap.
Hänsel Processing’s Strada candy die forming machine is another option, enabling the user to produce a seamless product that ensures more effective packing. This includes packing into blisters, a requirement for those operating in the nutraceutical and functional sweets sector. Gummies in particular have proven to be a popular format for many functional ingredients due to their convenience and great taste. Tanis Confectionery is a leading machinery supplier in this area, offering full turnkey solutions for the entire gums and jellies production process.
Alongside its equipment portfolio, the Tanis Candy Innovation Centre – which opened in 2020 next to the firm’s headquarters in the Netherlands – is fully equipped with a pilot line and state-of-the-art lab equipment for testing, allowing manufacturers to explore concepts and find the optimum recipe and processing setup required.
Equipment specialist Loynds similarly offers a candy test kitchen and packaging machinery showroom, having opened the Blackpool, UK, facility in 2024. Equipped with a wide range of machinery available for use, demonstration or testing, the site is available to companies looking to develop new recipes or products, or for packaging machinery trials, including for functional candy products.
As businesses continue to innovate and develop new candy formulations in available testing environments, one rapidly expanding sector is edible gummies in regions where cannabis consumption is legal.
A brand operating within this segment is The Bettering Company, an employee-owned enterprise dedicated to producing high-quality cannabis edibles. With a strong emphasis based on craftsmanship, the products use minimal, all-natural ingredients, with culinary driven flavours and consistent THC content.
When The Bettering Company needed to automate the wrapping process for both its edible chocolates and edible jellies, it chose Loynds to provide efficient, reliable systems that could handle the delicate nature of its products. Another brand operating within this sector is Extract Labs, which recently announced the launch of two new offerings: Organic CBD Gummies Full Spectrum and Organic CBD Gummies THC Free. These gummies are the firm’s first edibles that are USDA-certified organic, and are designed to improve overall wellness and reduce stress.
Raising production standards
For its part, Romanian-based manufacturer, RAP Confectionery has been notably active in developing innovations across segments including gummies and caramel, as well as chocolate products.
As the business explained, it has placed a strong emphasis on not only improving and adjusting the existing processes, but also by automating them, to raise quality standards further.
Moreover, as the company revealed, the manufacturing process begins with the preparation of the syrup composed of water, sugar, glucose syrup and specific ingredients such as pectin or gelatin that have the role of gelling the mixture. The syrup is concentrated in a kettle, with a double mantle through which steam circulates, and then the gelatin or pectin solution is added. The resulting mass is coloured, flavoured and, finally, the flavours are added. This process allows the production of smaller batches and also the development of custom recipes.

pic: Gummies being produced at RAP. Pic: RAP Confectionery
The mass is poured into wells printed in starch powder, on a NID line. It allows great flexibility in terms of product shape and also gives free rein to creativity in the development of new shapes. After cooling and gelling, the resulting jellies are separated from the starch and finished with a mixture of vegetable oil and carnauba wax, for a glossy appearance, or with sugar. Packaging can be done in bulk (in units up to 6 kg) or in bags of various sizes (between 50 and 500 g).
Furthermore, as the company explained, its lines can also produce chocolate wrapped caramels, at a high capacity and constant quality.. The candies from its lines are packed individually and then in bags weighing between 250 g and 1 kg. Various bulk packaging formats are also available.
Innovative nutraceutical solutions
With nutraceutical gummies proving to be one of the fastest-growing trends in dietary supplements, machinery group Syntegon offers innovative solutions for manufacturers to tap into this market. As stated by the firm, whether it’s sweets fortified with vitamins, omega-3, minerals, CBD or collagen, the variety of jellies and gummies with functional ingredients has rapidly increased in recent years. For this purpose, Syntegon – under its subsidiary Makat Candy Technology – developed the NutraFlash, an advanced turnkey line for the starchless production of functional gummy and jelly products. The solution, which includes dissolving, depositing, cooling and demoulding processes, is said to meet the requirements of nutraceutical production, including high dosing accuracy.
At the start of last year, Makat also initiated the NutraGummyFactory concept, which includes a team of experts offering a comprehensive overview of everything required to set up an industrial production line for nutraceutical gummies – from processing, packaging and auxiliary to services and support. The business highlights how this holistic concept empowers manufacturers with the knowledge and tools needed to succeed in this sector.
As is the case in the wider confectionery market, nutraceutical NPD has been strong. One such example comes from gummy and honey lozenge manufacturer Island Abbey Nutritionals, which developed a line of functional centre-filled gummies. Each of its three stock formulas contain active ingredients tailored to key consumer needs: immune support, sleep enhancement and energy boosting. The aforementioned innovations are just a small snapshot into the global market for jellies and gummies, but there’s a universal truth for all subsectors: the importance of innovation and versatility. As consumer preferences consistently shift at lightning speed, companies must keep track of trends and technology to maintain their competitive edge in this vibrant, ever expanding market