Production Figures for Easter

A couple of years ago, we visited Hershey, PA, and I really enjoyed reading all the facts and figures about how much candy Hershey produces, how much sugar they use, and so on. For Easter, I thought I'd do some research on Easter-related production figures. Here are a few interesting facts.

According to the National Confectioners' Association:

• Each Easter, 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are made.
• Each Easter, 16 billion jelly beans are produced.
• Additionally, in preparation for Easter, five million marshmallow chicks and bunnies are produced every day.

For those of you who can't get enough of those Cadbury Creme Eggs, I found these tasty tidbits on Cadbury's website:

• The Cadbury Creme Egg plant at Bournville, UK, can produce more than 1.5 million eggs per day.
• If you laid all the eggs made on the Creme Egg plant end to end, they would stretch 12,000 miles -- all the way from the Bourneville factory in Birmingham, UK, to Sydney, Australia.

Peeps lovers may find it interesting to know that¹:

• Peeps are the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy. Americans buy more than 700 million Marshmallow Peeps each Easter season.
• As many as 4.2 million Marshmallow Peeps, bunnies, and other shapes can be made each day.
• In 1953, it took 27 hours to create a Marshmallow Peep. Today it takes six minutes.

Naturally, a tremendous number of resources are required to produce all of these Easter goodies. Just Born, the company that produces Peeps, has over 500 employees in the Bethlehem and Philadelphia, PA areas. According to Answers.com, Cadbury employs 67,700 people.

 Answers.com also provided this interesting Easter figure. There are currently approximately 2.1 billion Christians in the world.

• According to an Al-Jazeerah interview with Sheikh Ahmad Al Katani, the president of The Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity every hour. This is 16,000 Muslims converting every day, 6 million Muslims converting every year. 
• I've also read that 10,000 Chinese and 5,000 Indians convert to Christianity each day.
  

This production is largely the work of just one man who lived, died, and rose again approximately 2,000 years ago.

Happy Easter everyone!

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

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1</sup>http://www.infoplease.com/spot/eastercandy1.html