Was at a shop and found a store selling Whirly Pops, with the lowest priced one at $2.99 and the highest priced being $105, for a 3 pound lollipop.

This in a weird way made me curious, how the ingredients/labor to make this could ever justify a price tag anywhere close to this.

Also, looked it up and found this is a market for giant candies, with huge price tags.

$65 is the cost of a giant Hershey Bar.
$32 for a .7 pound gummy worm.
$33 for a 5 pound gummy bear.
$22 for a 1 pound Hershey Kiss.
$40 for another 3 pound lollipop.

Wanted to focus on lollipops and see the actual costs it’d take for this.

Ingredient wise, lollipops are really simple.

Water
Sugar
Corn syrup
Citric acid
Artificial flavoring
Food dye

Found one recipe online for lollipops and to get a match of lollipops weighing up to one pound total, the recipe would look like this.

One cup of sugar, which a cup is 200 grams, for a little less than a pound of sugar.

Checked online and sugar averaged $0.62 a pound for what larger companies pay.

Meaning a pound of lollipops have $0.31 of sugar in them.

Half a cup of corn syrup is next.

Again, very cheap, where that should only be about $0.20.

The other ingredients from there are so cheap, there’s not even a point in counting them. Food coloring, flavoring and citric acid come to about $0.20 total combined.

Putting a pound of lollipops made at home to $0.71 in total costs.

Times by three and these three pound lollipops have about $2.13 of ingredients in them, each.

The real issue seems to be labor costs.

These aren’t difficult to make, but the issue is a time comparison.

These pops are larger and the batch takes the same time as what it’d be to make 32 pops that are 1.5 ounces, that’d retail for $2.99.

Which that’s where I believe the $105 price tag comes from.

The price of 32 of these pops would be $95 total at retail.

This makes it likely that they price these pops so high, because to make them, they need to justify the time and machines which could have made 32 pops and even price them higher, factoring in lower odds of casual sales.

All said and done, that makes some sense, but I weirdly feel social media could change the demand.

If someone made these via a mold method and priced them at $10-20, I could see them becoming a trend on social media to eat.

Nothing huge, but an interesting idea.