India, Aug. 9 -- What's the simplest candy to bring to market? The more I dig into this, the more I find that, incredibly, there is no such thing.

What about the lollipop, you might ask. It's just sugar syrup, boiled until the water content drops (to about 1%), then cooled and wrapped? How hard can that be?

Quite hard, it turns out.

If the lollipop isn't fully cooled and hardened before wrapping, residual heat can cause condensation within the wrapper, and one ends up with a sticky mess. To avoid this, commercial producers often wrap lollipops on cooled conveyor, belts in humidity-controlled environments, with laminar airflow to prevent condensation. (How's that for complicated?)

The lollipop is still the simplest of sweets. It gets m...