The candy that gets thrown at bar and bat mitzvahs disappeared this year, and while the country waits for its promised return, a Hicksville company has already made its replacement. Nassau Candy, the wholesale confectioner and fine food supplier headquartered on Long Island, has launched Fruit Jelly Jewels under its house brand Clever Candy: a sugar crusted jelly fruit disc aimed squarely at the hole Sunkist Fruit Gems left behind.

How a candy became a casualty

Sunkist Fruit Gems have carried the citrus grower's name since the early 1970s, and for generations of synagogue goers they are less a candy than a ritual. The individually wrapped, kosher certified jellies are the ones showered on kids at the bimah at the end of a bar or bat mitzvah ceremony, and they sit in candy dishes from the Five Towns to Great Neck.

Then the company that made them changed hands. Ferrara, the Chicago candy giant that acquired Jelly Belly in 2023, relaunched the Jelly Belly brand this spring and wound down the Fruit Gems line in the process. By September the candies were hard to find in stores or online, the dismay had gone national, and Sunkist announced that a new manufacturer, Kentucky based CandyRific, will bring the original back in early 2027.

That still leaves more than a year of empty candy dishes. Nassau Candy decided not to wait.

What the Hicksville version is

Fruit Jelly Jewels are chewy pectin discs with a soft jelly center and a crisp sugar coating, which is a precise description of what shoppers remember. The four classic citrus flavors are all here, orange, lemon, grapefruit and lime, and Nassau Candy added two of today's bestsellers, cherry and blueberry. The candies are made without artificial colors or flavors, carry kosher certification and are gluten free, and each piece is individually wrapped, which matters when the intended use involves a gentle arc through the air of a sanctuary.

The company is not being coy about the role the new candy plays. Its own catalog lists Fruit Jelly Jewels as the replacement for the Fruit Gems item numbers it used to carry, and its marketing team describes the launch as keeping the fun going while the original is out of production.

The company behind it

Nassau Candy is one of those Long Island businesses that is enormous and nearly invisible at the same time. From its Hicksville headquarters it manufactures and distributes specialty and private label confections for retailers across the country, runs its own brands including Clever Candy, and supplies the bulk bins, checkout racks and gift shops where candy like this actually gets bought. When a national product vanishes, few companies are better positioned to read the gap and fill it within months.

For Long Islanders the nice part is the return address. The candy being thrown at the next generation of b'nai mitzvah may not say Sunkist on the wrapper for a while, but it will say a name from Hicksville, and the classic flavors never had to leave the Island at all. Anyone whose family has a dish of these on the counter can start restocking now, no waiting until 2027 required.