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Any true gummy bear connoisseur knows the folks at Haribo have mastered the art of making that particular treat. The German company does have a factory in America but still imports some of its candy, and thousands of cases worth tens of thousands of dollars have gone missing from a storage facility in New Jersey.
It’s been a little more than a century since Hans Riegel, a candy maker from Bonn, Germany, whipped up a new treat in the form of the gummy bears that he produced for the first time in 1922. He began to peddle those them two years after he founded the company he dubbed “Haribo” (an amalgamation of the first two letters of “Hans,” “Reigel,” and “Bonn”), which is still going strong on the back of them over 100 years later.
Those gummy bears were larger and softer than the “Goldbears” that were introduced in 1960 before becoming the flagship product most people associate Haribo with today.
The company began to import its products into the United States for the first time in the 1970s, and while the company officially established a corporate presence in America in 1980, it didn’t begin producing the gummy bears in the country until opening a factory in Wisconsin in 2023.
That facility can pump out 60 million gummy bears a day, but its output is still supplemented from imports from abroad—including one shipment that is now at the center of a police investigation.
Thousands of cases of Haribo gummy bears worth close to $50,000 were stolen in New Jersey
60 Minutes recently chronicled the heist that sparked a search for 24,000 bottles of tequila produced by the brand owned by Guy Fieri and Sammy Hagar, which was traced to a counterfeit trucking operation that executed a fairly sophisticated scam to pull off the robbery.
That is just one of many instances where thieves have managed to make off with the trucks and shipping containers that are apparently easier to steal unnoticed than you may think—as evidenced by yet another crime highlighting that reality.
According to the Potomac Press, a container of Haribo gummy bears containing 3,222 cases of the candy that was being stored at a facility in the vicinity of the Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey is now nowhere to be found, and officials are on the hunt for a haul they say is worth $48,000.
HARIBO GUMMY BEARS STOLEN
AUTHORITIES are looking for a missing cargo shipment of 3,222 cases of Gummy bears stolen from 1130 Polaris Street in Elizabeth New Jersey. The estimated value is 48k Dollars.
— Potomac press (@potomacpressdc) October 9, 2025
Those are the only details that have been released at the time of this writing, but here’s to hoping they’re able to track down the people responsible for this truly senseless crime.