Food Safety Focus | Focus on Cotton Candy

Food Safety Focus

Food Safety Focus –

Hello All Team Members!

I hope this message finds all of you and your families safe and well,

Did you know that cotton candy was invented by a dentist? Talk about a contradiction! Let’s take a look.

Dentist William Morrison, along with confectioner John C. Wharton from Nashville, invented fairy floss back in 1897 and together patented the very first fairy floss spinning machine. They brought the machine to The St. Louis World Fair in 1904 and sold almost 70,000 servings at .25 cent each. That’s not a bad day for sales, especially in the early 1900’s. Admission to the fair was 50 cents to get in so fairy floss cost half the admission to get in! It was so good people couldn’t get enough and fairy floss was an instant success.

Another dentist named Josef Lascaux would later call fairy floss “cotton candy” after a failed experiment to improve the design of the machine, and the name stuck. In 1949 Gold Metal Products would perfect the cotton candy machine as we know it to be today, with a spring-loaded base and are still one of the top producers of cotton candy machines in the world.

Today cotton candy is a sweet treat that you could easily find at any fair or carnival. Worldwide, cotton candy has a global market value of over 107 billion dollars with a projected worth of over $169 billion dollars by 2032. That’s a lot of fairy floss, to say the least.

I hope you had fun learning about cotton candy today and sometime soon you’ll get to enjoy a little fairy floss with your family and friends. Speaking of families and friends, thank you for all you do to provide safe food for our families and friends each and every Day!

Justin Straka – Food Safety Manager

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Author: Trish Metts