Every single Peep — America’s most beloved Easter candy — comes from one place: Bethlehem, Pa.

There is no gift shop, no factory tour, no visitors’ center at Just Born Quality Confections. That doesn’t stop fans from coming anyway. They tap on the tinted doors to see if there’s any chance of catching a glimpse of the 102-year-old company’s most beloved product.

They’re there to peep the Peeps.

Just Born makes 2 billion Peeps every year — enough to circle the globe two times, according to brand manager Caitlin Servian — and every one of the plump, fluffy, sugarcoated marshmallows is hatched on a conveyor belt inside this three-story Lehigh Valley plant. Peeps are not the only candy manufactured here, but they are undoubtedly what draws tourists to this otherwise-quiet part of Bethlehem, Pa., where the company has been headquartered since 1932.

Around Easter, the rate of hopeful visitors to Just Born spikes. Those who don’t make it inside can console themselves by taking a selfie with the canary yellow Peeps-mobile parked next to the entrance. If they’re lucky, they’ll catch the eye of Deb, the cheerful receptionist, and make it as far as the lobby. She’ll buzz them in so they have a chance to marvel at the enormous replicas of candy boxes and wall-mounted mascots, watch a short film of production clips, and maybe even score a gift bag filled with all the candies Just Born makes: Mike and Ikes, Hot Tamales, Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, and plain, old jelly beans.

The Bethlehem company handles all these household-name brands, but none has blown up bigger than Peeps, a pop-culture icon of the chicks’ own making. In recent years, Peeps have been the center of competitive eating competitions and diorama contests like Peddler’s Village’s own Peeps in the Village, launched in 2019 (this year’s runs through April 27). The marshmallows have been made into shrines, displayed in art exhibitions, and sculpted into statues. “Peeps jousting” — in which two toothpick-wielding Peeps are microwaved simultaneously, to see which one punctures the other first — has been broadcast on YouTube.

Just Born has licensing agreements with companies that have used Peeps imagery for stuffed animals, jewelry, clothes, even string lights (look for them at your neighborhood dollar store). This year there’s even Peeps-flavored milk and a takeover of the New York cafe Serendipity3, featuring Peeps-branded frozen hot chocolate, Belgian waffles, and sundaes.

Love them or hate them, there’s a reason that Peeps are the best-selling Easter candy that’s not chocolate.

The scent of spicy cinnamon, evidently drifting in from the Hot Tamales area, perfumes the air in the hallway that leads to the Peeps production floor. Through swinging doors and past pallets of ingredients, fluorescent-green sugar spins around inside four tumblers that look like mini-cement mixers. The sugar is bound for upstairs, where they’re cranking out monster-shaped Peeps for Halloween. (Just Born typically works six months ahead; Peeps have a roughly two-year shelf life.) Each stainless-steel tumbler holds 400 pounds of white sugar that’s poured in one 50-pound bag at a time. Unless the day’s docket includes snow-white Peeps — for snowmen-, egg-, and skull-shaped marshmallows — the sugar gets tinted in any one of a rainbow of colors, from robin’s-egg blue and gingerbread brown to deep lavender and hot pink. (The sugar that coats Peeps is also often a vehicle for limited-edition flavors, such as the recent Rice Krispies treat flavor, as it’s faster to flavor the sugar than the marshmallow itself.)

The top-selling Peep variety, far and away, is the signature yellow, and that’s what was flowing on the main conveyor belt on the April morning of The Inquirer’s visit to Just Born. Several barrels of the sunny sugar stand at the foot of the production line, ready for service. The sugar is piped into the line by hose, shifting like quicksand inside the barrel as it’s funneled off and distributed in a dense, inch-thick layer that’s evenly spread onto the belt from edge to edge.

It’s on this plush blanket of sugar that Just Born’s trade-secret depositor lays the marshmallow Peeps — five at a time, six rows across — in a continuous, elliptical motion that perfectly articulates every detail of the squat chicks, from their pointed beaks and chubby curves to their just-perceptible tails. The depositor pumps out 360 clusters a minute, according to senior manager of operations Roberto Maderas, a 20-year Just Born veteran. Just Born makes Peeps around the clock, five days a week, cranking out roughly 5.5 million Peeps per day.

Maderas has seen the manufacturing technology the company uses grow more sophisticated over time, but says this downstairs belt, which exclusively makes chicks, is more manual than the robot-equipped production lines two floors up. (The upstairs floor produces chicks and bunnies as well as the myriad other shapes Just Born has come up with over the years: hearts, ghosts, black cats, pumpkins, gingerbread men, reindeer, etc.)

After being formed directly on a bed of sugar, naked Peeps travel down the conveyor, into a metal chamber rigged with air knives — compressed-air blowers — that blitz the chicks with hundreds of pounds of swirling sugar. The Peeps emerge from the sugary dust bowl in seconds, fully clad in color. A few beats down the line, machines hovering overhead drop dots of confectioners’ glaze at just the right moment to give each chick its brown eyes.

Next: a brief sweep past Peeps facial recognition. As the chicks march on down the line, a camera captures split-second images of each cluster and analyzes their decoration to make sure it’s up to snuff. The monitoring can be adjusted for other kinds of chicks, like Dr Pepper Peeps or coffee Peeps.

If their eyes are well-placed — “everything that’s a single dot right on the crown is all good,” Maderas says — then the Peeps pass muster. If not, they’re pulled off the line before packaging and sent back to the beginning, a.k.a. melted back into marshmallow. (Mixers can add up to 220 pounds of imperfectly decorated Peeps to a new batch of marshmallow; the coloring fades away. It’s one of several waste-reduction measures Just Born takes, including finding reuses for its sugar dust, the sweetened water that’s left from cleaning down equipment, and imperfect chicks that make it to packaging: Somewhere in Pennsylvania, a cow is eating a blemished Peep.)

Between the dazzling colors and the adorable shapes, it’s easy to overlook the marshmallow, the core of a Peep. Just Born uses the same ingredients to make it as a home cook would: water, sugar (liquid and granulated), corn syrup, gelatin, and a teeny bit of vanilla. It all comes together in a giant kettle, 2,200 pounds at a time. Once mixed and cooked, the marshmallow gets aerated before it’s pumped into the depositor; the air provides the Peeps their trademark fluffy texture and creamy white interior.

The molten marshmallow is still hot when it’s shaped — a freshly hatched Peep reads somewhere around 154 degrees Fahrenheit. It has just enough of a runway to cool down before it’s boxed up: Six minutes elapse from the moment Peeps are piped to the time they are packaged. The process has been that quick for at least three decades, but it’s a long way from how the marshmallow chicks and bunnies were first made when they were created in the 1930s.

Just Born was founded by Russian immigrant Sam Born, who, according to company history, was a candy-making whiz. In 1912, he automated the process for inserting sticks into lollipops (dubbed the “Born Sucker Machine”), eventually earning him a key to the city of San Francisco. Later on, he pioneered technology for making chocolate jimmies (said to be named after a factory worker) as well as the chocolate coating used on ice cream bars.

Samuel Born started Just Born — at first specializing in “French chocolates” — in Brooklyn in 1923. By the time the company moved to Bethlehem, he had brought on his brothers-in-law, Irv and Jack Shaffer, and Just Born had started segueing toward jelly candies. It introduced Mike and Ikes in 1940 and Hot Tamales in 1950. In 1953, Just Born acquired Lancaster’s Rodda Candy Co., known for its jelly eggs. They had also unwittingly purchased what would become the company’s biggest brand.

Rodda had been making marshmallow Easter candy in Lancaster since at least 1936. The “peeps and chicks‚” priced at 1 cent apiece, were advertised in several Lancaster newspapers at the time, along with its jelly eggs, hollow eggs, and coconut cream eggs. The original Rodda Peeps (as they were marketed until the early aughts) came in yellow, pink, and white and had two little wings tucked against their backs. They were hand-piped, the still-warm marshmallow painstakingly squeezed out of 15-pound pastry bags by a fleet of women who reportedly went home with hands cramped and swollen.

Early Peeps took a full 24 hours to firm up before they were sugared and decorated. Bob Born, Sam Born’s son, described the process he witnessed inside Rodda’s production floor to Lancaster’s Sunday News in 2003: “Another girl with a regular-sized pastry bag and a double dot nozzle squeezed icing eyes onto them, one Peep at a time.” In all, producing a single Peep could take up to 27 hours.

Bob changed all of that by 1954, when he and plant manager Joe Truse automated the Peeps-making process, moving the whole thing to a conveyor belt. (Bob admitted perfection took some time: “We made so many samples, at first some of them coming down the line looked like seals,” he told the Associated Press in 2003.) It didn’t take Just Born long to expand to other shapes, introducing bunnies by 1956 and pumpkins by 1958. By some reports, Peeps’ wings were eliminated in 1991, but a 1994 Morning Call story reports that Just Born clipped them in the early ’60s, after it “test marketed wingless Peeps and got no complaints.”

The same Morning Call article describes an internal report Just Born had showing that 25% of consumers preferred a stale Peep. “People like them stale so they can crunch the head off,” then-director of operations Burton Shaffer told the paper, adding that some people punctured Peeps packaging and left them out to dry while others popped them in the microwave. That may have been one of the company’s earliest indicators that, once they reached customers, Peeps took on a life of their own.

According to Servian, the Peeps brand manager, when the internet went mainstream in the late ’90s, “our marketing team at the time started to look into what was going on online in terms of the conversation, and they found a lot of diorama contests and crafts and people, what we say, expressing their ‘Peeps-onality.’” All Just Born had to do to was lean in, cementing Peeps as a pop-culture icon.

As Peeps’ fame has spread — the candy is distributed nationally, in Canada, and, starting this year, in Japan — the family-operated company hasn’t budged from its longtime Bethlehem roots. Many of its 600 employees are second- or third-generation, like its ownership, and Just Born is involved in the community. Since 2009, it has held PeepsFest, a family-friendly New Year’s Eve tradition whose claim to fame is the 400-pound fiberglass Peep that drops at the stroke of 5 p.m.

All in all, it reinforces the fuzzy feelings inspired by this endearing Easter candy, even if you’re not a marshmallow fan. As Servian says: “They’re just so cute and such an iconic part of spring … what’s not to love about Peeps?”