Thursday, October 23, 2008

PEZ

Ok not sure this will interest any of you but I happen to really like PEZ candies and so I thought this was very neat.
WHAT IS PEZ?
You must be living in a box if you are not familiar with this candy and its flip-top head dispensers.
Over 1 billion of these little bundles of compressed sugar are sold each year. So where did this novel approach to selling candy come from? To find out, we must take a trip back to Vienna, Austria in 1927.
Here we will find a candyman named Eduard Haas III. Eddie did not try to sell his candy to kids, however. His market was adults - adults that smoked cigarettes.
PEZ was originally marketed as a compressed breath mint for smokers (or to cover up smoker's breath). I know what you are thinking - How did those fruit flavored pellets cover your bad breath?
The answer is quite simple - they weren't fruit flavored back then!
In fact, they were peppermint flavored, which explains the origin of its unusual name. The German word for peppermint is PfeffErminZ. Take the first, middle, and last letters of the word and you get PEZ!
Which leads to the available flavors.
In the United States, only Grape, Lemon, Orange, Strawberry, and Peppermint (I am a large consumer of PEZ and don't recall ever having peppermint) flavors are available. Hop across the border to Canada and you can add Cherry to your stash.
Raspberry and Apple are available in Spain. Chocolate is available in Hungary and Thailand.
An unusual type known as IZO PEZ is also available - it is vitamin enriched (does a vitamin enriched candy make sense to you?).
The most unusual flavors, however, have to be the discontinued ones: Chlorophyll, Cinnamon, Coffee, Eucalyptus, Flower (just what do flowers taste like?), Licorice, and Menthol.
What were the marketing guys thinking of when they came up with some of these flavors?

Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

3 comments:

Coffee Slut said...

I love Pez! I always include a holiday Pez dispenser in every Christmas stocking I stuff!

Anonymous said...

chlorophyl? lol what does *that* taste like?

Interesting post!

Farmer*swife a/k/a Glass_Half_Full said...

I did not know that! Hmmmp. Learn something new every day!