yes, 150K randomly positioned, rotated and scaled instances using V-Ray instancing.
have a try 
gummi-bears.3dm (1.5 MB)
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well, i triedā¦ this is my best shot, recreating the textures and lighting was a challenge i must say, with a slow computer that is a really serious challenge. and i am still pretty much a cycles noob. i am not going to get there right now, such crisp caustics as you beautifully exhibited are simply not possible in cycles. still it certainly is a good practice and the result is at least somehow rewarding.
i think to give it a real fair comparison i would need a bit more info from your side. could you share some insight how you created the light? i tried to match it but i still have a slight gradient going on, moving the light into the camera is not an option because in parallel mode the object will still show millions away, then i would have to switch to a perspective view instead which i was too lazy or lets say it was basically too late to reiterate, and rendering that stuff takes forever.
here a 2 hour render, i think it would need 1 more but i have to leave it there now.
thanks for the scene by the way, hope i did it a little justice, but again yours is really a work of art i think its fair to say vray helps but it still needs somebody who masters it.
oh and i stole a chunk of your background to recreate a similar look 
there you go cycles version
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This was the light setup:
the smaller light on the right is to fill in the shadows a bit
no problem
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Really amazing.
Iām trying to recreate this effect myself in VRay, thank you for the pointers above.
Could I ask how you went about this texture and adding the sugar?
The texture is a Vray procedural map applied as bump map. As for the sugar, I already explained how earlier in this thread.
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Thank you.
My laptop hates this. I got the sugar in place (50k pieces) but I canāt figure out the random rotation.
Working like this with only Transform data is new for me, since Iām not actually transforming geometry Iām not sure what to plug in for the center of rotation or base plane, depending on which rotation component I used. The two examples Iāve found online show it left blank. Iāve tried every variation I could think of and crashed almost as many times. When I donāt crash, I end up getting this halo effect, which I understand on some level but what is the solution?
Hi @closedcurve , I basically made planes normal to the object and used plane rotations instead. Itās correct that you need to work with transforms, no geometry needs to be plugged in to the geometry channel. btw: For the random points, the native populate is quite slow. I used a script by @laurent_delrieu to generate random points.
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Cool to see antother use, I mainly use my script for Dendro.
here the link
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Very Cool!
Looks like a 3D Model more suitable for either Blender or Zbrush, but intresting to do it with Rhino as well