Kevin and I watched the new Candyman movie the other day, which was sort of a reboot of the Candyman series. We thought it was really good, lots of jump-scares and great special effects that grabbed us, and a pretty good take on the story and legend of Candyman. That’s about all I can say about it really. But while I was looking for information about this upcoming movie weeks ago, I stumbled onto a little documentary from 2010 called “Candyman” that I had never seen before.

It was a somewhat depressing documentary on the REAL creator of Jelly Belly jelly beans, David Klein. That’s right, someone else created the Jelly Belly jelly bean, not the Goelitz candy company. I was really pretty surprised, since they seemed to omitted this guy completely from the history of Jelly Belly, or he was made such a tiny footnote in their history that no one notices. Either way, this poor guy created the Jelly Belly jelly bean and now he’s got nothing.

The documentary explains it all very well, in sad detail, with no fancy “re-enactments” or actors. This is the real deal – everyone involved, in their own words. To make a long story short, it was David Klein who created this bean shape and many of the initial flavors of the beans, and he made some money, but not a lot. He mostly just liked giving away candy, especially on his birthday, and I think he still does to this day. He’s making other candies these days, just trying to stay afloat.

He sold the rights to the Jelly Belly brand to the Goelitz Candy Company in 1976 for a total of $4.8 million, half of which went to his partner, to be paid out over 20 years in monthly payments of $20,000. So David Klein got $10,000 per month up until 1996 and that was it. Unfortunately no royalties were mentioned in the contact at all, so that was it – $4.8 million over 20 years, period. Jelly Belly makes over $100 million a year now, and David Klein doesn’t get a penny. That’s really sad.

You would think a company of that size, or even just one of it’s high-paid executive family members, would feel something, at least, and work in a way to compensate the actual creator somehow, but no. I even went to Jelly Belly’s “company history” on their website, and there are dozens of pages documenting their history year-by-year, beginning in 1869 when Gustav Goelitz opened his first candy business. The “1976” page says “The breakthrough recipe of the Mini Jelly Bean inspired the first eight flavors of Jelly Belly beans…” That’s it. The Goelitz company went on from then making all kinds of candy, but clearly, David Klein’s Jelly Belly beans have made it the most money and has enabled them to be successful with all of their other candy brands. After watching this, I have lost a lot of respect for the Goelitz Candy Company. Their history just isn’t complete. I can’t even believe this documentary was published in 2010 – 11 years ago – and still nothing has changed. It’s just sad.