After waiting a few moments, the Candy Craftsman adds just the right amount of red colour for the casing, and yellow colour for the centre. Carefully measured amounts of Citric Acid (to give the rock that well known "tang") and Pineapple flavouring are then added to the yellow centre, and mixed in well with a pallet knife. We have searched high and low for the best quality flavourings available, and would never use anything less.

The syrup soon starts to solidify where it is in contact with the cooling table. The Candy Craftsman then cuts the batch into its two constituent parts (the casing and the centre).

Both parts are then kneaded by the Candy Craftsman in order to ensure that all the flavouring and colour distribute themselves evenly throughout the mixture. All the time, he is monitoring the "feel" of the batch to determine when it is ready for the following production stages. There is no measuring device available to achieve this, just touch, and it takes years of experience to truly master.

Up until now, the yellow centre is clear in appearance. To turn it the required opaque, the mixture has to be "pulled" on a machine called, believe it or not, a pulling machine. The centre and casing are then worked up further on the cooling table.

The red casing is then transferred from the cooling table to a hot table (electrically heated), so that the consistency it has reached by now is maintained. Here, it is rolled out flat into a square shape. The yellow centre is rolled up into a thick "sausage", and is placed in the centre of the casing, which is then wrapped around the centre to form what is in effect a giant lump of rock.

The giant lump of rock now has to be extruded down to form lots of sticks of rock. This is done through the forming line, the first stage of which is called a "batch roller". This performs the primary extrusion.

The secondary extrusion is performed by a "rope sizer", so called because by this stage the strand of rock is referred to in the trade as a "rope". The rope sizer reduces the diameter of the rope in 4 stages to the desired rock diameter.

The rope is then fed onto a table running parallel with the line, where it is cut into 3.75m (about 12 ft) lengths. Here, it is hand-rolled back and forth, until it becomes hard enough to maintain its circular shape by itself.

Once hard enough, the sticks of rock are cut in half, and hand-fed through a rock chopping machine to produce the familiar chunks. These are sieved to remove any small chippings.

The chunks are then weighed and packed into plastic jars. If the rock is for packets, it is first "crystallised" - coated in caster sugar to prevent it sticking together.