Make your own PEZ refills

October 8, 2006 11:33 PM

Non-sticky tiny candy? How could I make my own Pez candy refills?

I'd like to make my own PEZ candy in unavailable flavours. (I'm leaning towards ginger) I've found recipes for hard candy, and I figure I could make that and mold it into tiny rectangles?

But I'm worried that the standard hard candy recipe could turn out to be too sticky or hard to work with. Anyone have candy-making tips to emulate that chalky texture we know and love?

posted by RobotHero to food & drink (4 comments total)

The name of this style is "press candy," and is formed by flavoring the powder and pressing it into shapes, like they do for medication. I'm sure you could get a metalsmith to create the right size of die for this, and then it would pretty much be a process of experimentation. Due to its industrial aspects (it's pretty much only a "big label" style of candy) I doubt there are many recipes for this kind of thing. I'd start with kool aid and the ingredients list from PEZ and triangulate it from there.
posted by rhizome at 12:27 AM on October 9, 2006

Okay. Makes sense.

I found a couple things being sold as "tablet presses" which is basically what you are talking about.

Most of them were fancy automated things that cost $4000 and pump out 6000 tablets per hour. Maybe if I figure out how to market PEZ-compatible candy without breaking trademark law, I can get one of those. But if I'm just making personal amounts, $4000 is a little too pricey.

I only found one that's in my price range, here, but I can't see it that closely, and I don't know how much of that I will need to replace to make it rectangular instead of circular.
posted by RobotHero at 12:30 PM on October 9, 2006

For small scale production all you need is a shop press or arbor and a simple set of dies. A machinist can make the dies in less than a day, you'd just have to specify the dimensions.

Be aware that a pill press can be considered to be drug paraphernalia.
posted by Mitheral at 1:01 PM on October 9, 2006

Yeah, although on the other hand, selling Pez-shaped ecstasy tablets + dispensers might recoup that $4,000 pretty fast...
posted by cps at 3:13 PM on October 9, 2006