What breaks first
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Hands
Cutting, wrapping, dipping and packing are all manual and all scale linearly with volume. There is no clever way around it at small scale, which is why confectionery businesses hit a people ceiling earlier than an equipment one.
Cooling and setting space
Everything here has to cool somewhere flat, undisturbed and at a controlled temperature, often for hours. Bench and rack space fills up long before the pans do, and it is the constraint nobody plans for because it does not look like equipment.
The seasonal peak, which compresses everything
A year’s demand arriving in weeks means the ceiling that matters is what you can make and pack in that window, not what you can make in a month. Making ahead helps only as far as the shelf life allows, which for anything with dairy is not far.
Chocolate adds a holding constraint
Tempered chocolate has to be kept in temper while you work, which puts a clock on a batch and limits how much can be in progress at once. That is a different kind of constraint from the sugar half and it is the reason tempering equipment is usually the first real purchase.
Humidity caps your available days
In a damp climate some days are simply bad for hard candy and brittle, and during a short season that is capacity you do not have. Climate control in the production room is expensive and is sometimes the honest answer.
Where to spend first
Anything that reduces handling time: a guitar cutter, a wrapping aid, better molds, more cooling racks. All of them return hours in the window where hours are the binding constraint.