Sunkist Fruit Gems Were Discontinued. Then They Weren't.

Picture the end of a bar mitzvah Torah reading. The kid finishes the last blessing, and the whole congregation lets fly with a hail of soft, sugar-coated, neon-bright candy. For about as long as anyone can remember, that candy was Sunkist Fruit Gems.

So when word got around this September that Sunkist Fruit Gems had been quietly discontinued, it landed hard. Synagogues bought up the last cases. Online sellers ran dry. And then, two days after the story went wide, Sunkist announced that the candy wasn’t going anywhere after all.

Here is what actually happened, where Fruit Gems came from in the first place, and what the whole episode says about why the candies you grew up with keep disappearing.

Are Sunkist Fruit Gems discontinued?

Not permanently. Fruit Gems are coming back. The Ferrara Candy Company, which made them, discontinued Fruit Gems on May 1, 2026. On September 26, 2026, Sunkist said on Instagram that it is working with a new family-owned candy maker to bring Fruit Gems back with the same flavor, the same quality and the same kosher certification. Three days later it told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency when, and with whom.

Where things stand as of October 2, 2026.

• The original Fruit Gems are out of production, and remaining stock is scarce.
• The new maker is CandyRific, a candy company in Kentucky.
• Sunkist expects the new Fruit Gems on shelves in early 2027, with the individual wrappers, the soft texture, the fruit flavors and the kosher certification all kept.

If you need something for an event before then, our wrapped fruit slices are the closest thing we carry, and there are more options below.

How a quiet discontinuation became national news

The discontinuation itself made no noise. Ferrara, which acquired Jelly Belly (and with it, Fruit Gems) in 2023, simply stopped selling the candy in May. At least one candy wholesaler found out in August, when Ferrara turned down his order.

The wider world found out in late September. eJewishPhilanthropy reported the discontinuation on September 24, and a Ferrara customer service representative told the outlet the decision came down to a lack of consumer demand across the country. Asked whether the candy might return, he called it possible but not likely.

What followed was a very modern kind of run on the bank. One Berkeley rabbi ordered 50 pounds on the spot. The remaining Fruit Gems sold out on Amazon and Walmart. Nassau Candy, which had announced a lookalike called Clever Candy Fruit Jelly Jewels the day before, found itself holding the obvious replacement. Columnists wrote obituaries.

Then, on Saturday, September 26 (which also happened to be Shabbat and the first day of Sukkot), Sunkist posted the line everyone wanted to read. “Sunkist Fruit Gems are not going anywhere.”

The history of Sunkist Fruit Gems

Fruit Gems were a citrus by-product before they were a candy.

Sunkist is not a candy company. It’s a growers’ cooperative that has marketed California and Arizona citrus since the 1890s. The most common account goes like this. In the 1930s, the growers had more oranges, lemons and grapefruit than they could sell as fruit, so they looked for ways to turn the surplus into something else, like orange oil, lemon oil, citric acid and pectin. They took those ingredients to the Christopher Candy Company, founded in Los Angeles in 1887 and one of the oldest candy makers in the West, and asked for a candy built around them. The result was a fruit jelly Christopher sold as Christopher’s Fruit Gems.

The candy’s longer life belongs to the Myerson family. Ben Myerson started in the candy business in 1912 and opened the Ben Myerson Candy Company in Los Angeles in 1937. In 1955 the company bought Christopher Candy, and Fruit Gems came with it. Accounts differ on when the Sunkist name went on the package. Some 2026 news coverage says 1966, but the Los Angeles Business Journal, reporting in 2006, put it at 1974, when Myerson became only the second company ever to license the Sunkist name and the first in the United States.

By the 2000s, Fruit Gems were made in a downtown Los Angeles factory on Towne Street. Bob Myerson started there sweeping floors at 12 and was still arriving at half past five in the morning after 60 years. In 1946 Los Angeles had about 25 family-run commercial candy makers. By 2006 there were two, and the Myersons decided to step back and focus on the wine and spirits business they had built alongside the candy.

On November 1, 2006, Jelly Belly Candy Company took over the Sunkist Fruit Gems line and moved production to its plant in Fairfield, California. (The Myersons’ chocolate line went to a different buyer.) Jelly Belly ran Fruit Gems for 17 years, until Ferrara bought Jelly Belly in 2023.

The flavors shifted along the way. The classic lineup was orange, lemon, lime, cherry, raspberry and grapefruit. It was trimmed to four around the 2006 move, and a 2012 relaunch switched to natural flavors and colors, brought grapefruit back and added blueberry.

A Jelly Belly era box of Sunkist Fruit Gems, after the 2012 switch to natural flavors.

What makes a Fruit Gem a Fruit Gem

A Fruit Gem is a pectin jelly, a soft, round, sugar-sanded disc a little over an inch across. Pectin is the same fruit-derived gelling agent that sets jam, which gives the candy a short, clean bite rather than the springy chew of a gelatin gummy. It is also why Fruit Gems were straightforward to keep kosher, since there’s no animal gelatin to worry about.

If that description sounds familiar, you’ve probably met the candy’s cousins. Chuckles have been around since 1921 and share the sugar-coated jelly formula, and jelly fruit slices are the same idea cut into a half-moon. We covered Chuckles (and a dozen other survivors) in our roundup of candies older than your grandparents. What set Fruit Gems apart was the combination of pectin jelly, citrus flavor, individual wrappers and a kosher symbol on the bag.

How Fruit Gems became synagogue candy

That combination is exactly what made Fruit Gems the default candy for throwing at a bar or bat mitzvah, or at a couple at their aufruf, the Torah honor before a wedding. The candy had to be kosher, wrapped so it could be picked up off the floor and eaten, and soft enough that nobody went home with a black eye. Fruit Gems checked every box.

That demand was real. One Pennsylvania candy wholesaler told eJewishPhilanthropy he sold well over 1,000 pounds of Fruit Gems last year alone. Beyond the bimah, the candy filled Purim gift baskets, candy drives and the tables at nonprofit galas.

Why beloved candies get discontinued

A Ferrara customer service rep said nationwide demand was too weak, and the company later told JTA it cut the line to focus its resources on future growth and innovation. Anyone who has stood in a sanctuary during a candy barrage would find the demand part hard to believe. The gap between those two views explains most of what happens to classic candy.

Deep but narrow demand looks small on a spreadsheet

A candy bought by the case, by synagogues and party planners, a few times a year, can matter enormously to the people who buy it and still barely register in national grocery sales. When a big company reviews a portfolio of hundreds of products, the low-volume lines are the first to go.

Consolidation keeps shrinking the list

Fruit Gems went from a family company, to a larger family company, to a subsidiary of Ferrara, which sits in the same corporate family as the Italian Ferrero Group. Each step put the candy inside a bigger catalog with more products competing for the same factory time.

Shared lines can cost a candy its kosher status

The same Ferrara rep noted that a factory can lose kosher certification when non-kosher products are added to its lines. The same wholesaler said he has watched other longtime kosher favorites lose their certification, and that sellers often don’t find out until the product is in hand. For a candy bought almost entirely for kosher celebrations, losing the symbol would mean losing the customers.

Licensing is what made the rescue possible

Sunkist owns the name. Ferrara owned the factory and the license. When the manufacturer walked away, the brand owner was free to take the name and the recipe expectations to someone else. Necco Wafers went through something similar. After Necco collapsed in 2018, Spangler Candy bought the brand, and the wafers came back about two years later. Not every candy has a brand owner with a reason to fight for it. Fruit Gems had one, plus a fan base that emptied the shelves. The reversal came days after the sellouts, and empty shelves and a flood of orders are exactly the signal a brand owner watches for.

What to buy while you wait

If you have a simcha on the calendar before Fruit Gems return, three things we carry come closest to the job.

• Wrapped fruit slices, sugar-coated jelly slices in orange, lemon, lime and watermelon, each in its own wrapper. They’re bigger than a Fruit Gem, so lob them gently, and check the bag for a hechsher before you count on them for shul.
• Assorted salt water taffy, soft, twist-wrapped and certified kosher (dairy, which matters if it’s going anywhere near a meat kiddush).
• Tootsie Frooties, small, light, wrapped fruit chews that carry the OU. Like the taffy, they’re dairy.

Certifications here are the manufacturers’ and the agencies’ as of September 2026, not ours, and CandyDirect is not a kosher certifier. Certifications and packaging change, so check the symbol on the bag you actually receive, and ask your rabbi if you’re unsure whether a product meets your community’s standard.

When will Fruit Gems be back?

Early 2027, according to Sunkist, made by CandyRific. The new Fruit Gems won’t reach every distributor on day one, so give it a few weeks past the launch before you count on them for an event. Our Sunkist Fruit Gems listing is still up, currently out of stock. We’ll update this page when Sunkist names a ship date.