__ Extreme candy is the fastest-growing segment of the $23 billion US market. Kids want gross, sour novelties with special effects - and they'll pay for it. __
It's called the Monster Mouth, it costs three bucks, and it's like something out of Naked Lunch, a cartoonishly grotesque monster head (your choice of Frankenstein, the Mummy, or Godzilla) mounted on what looks like a miniature basketball pump. Press the plunger and the monster's jaws spring open, ejecting a diseased-looking sour-candy tongue.
It's a perfect companion to the Skull Suckers, another sugar-coated line of necrophilia trinkets currently in the mouths of kids everywhere. These clear-plastic, accordion-pleated tubes of sweet red goo are topped by a human skull made of chalky yellow candy. Bulging blood vessels are printed on the skull; its eyes are hollow, encircled in gloomy rings of black food dye. By following the instructions - "Squeeze bottom and suck candy head" - you can drink bloody syrup from the eye sockets.
Skull Suckers and the Monster Mouth are part of a new confectionery juggernaut, one composed of slime, blinking lights, fake blood, electronic drumbeats, DC motors, edible soap bubbles, integrated circuits, arachnids and insects, Victorian-style toy contraptions, and let's-pretend-it's-toxic-waste gunk. The candy industry uses terms like "novelty candy" and "interactive candy" to describe products with extreme flavors, grotesque or horrific themes, or "play value." (Sometimes an item, like the Monster Mouth, has all three.) Kids consume upwards of $200 million worth of interactive candies - confections that are part toy - each year, making this one of the fastest-growing segments of the $23 billion US candy market. Last year, the sales of novelty candy increased by 11.5 percent, a hyperactive surge.
More children are in the novelty-candy target market (ages 6 to 15) these days, and those kids, like kids before them, have voluble control over what they snack on. James McNeal, a marketing professor at Texas A&M, coined filiarchy, a Latin-esque term that can be loosely translated as "a tyranny of tots," to describe what happens in grocery store aisles: Preverbal tykes point and whine; kids who can actually speak are that much more efficient.
These days, kids want special effects edited into their candy. A Tootsie Pop's chewy center was good enough for coonskin-capped Davy Crockett fans in the '50s, but modern youngsters demand candy that spins, luminesces, or plays music in their heads. They require pops with holographs printed on them, pops that turn their spit into kaleidoscopic fizz. Add a couple of interactive-toy features and kids get the best of both worlds - colorful lumps of mind-altering sugar packaged into battery-powered gizmos that beep, rattle, blink, and dispense candy with enough force to bruise lips.
A bag of Mega Warheads, a runaway-hit "extreme sour" hard candy, carries this cautionary note: "Eating multiple pieces within a short time period may cause a temporary irritation to sensitive tongues and mouths." The label on a Glow Pop - hard candy shaped like an alien's head, attached to a chemically luminescent plastic handle - reads like it was lifted from the "Happy Funball" skit on Saturday Night Live, which parodied ridiculously exhaustive labels.
"Do not drink or ingest the contents of the Lightstick," the label admonishes. "Do not puncture or cut the Lightstick. The Lightstick contains one or more small glass ampoules. Contact of Lightstick ingredients with skin or eye may cause temporary discomfort. ... After use, dispose of in refuse container. Glow Pop not recommended for children under six years of age."
The candy department at Kmart, Target, or Wal-Mart looks like the marital-aids section of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square smut shop, offering such novelties as the Trembler, a vibrating Tootsie Pop holder, and the Spin Pop, a sucker with a motor that spins the candy in your mouth. When it comes to taste, sour rules the day, relegating the cinnamon-hot Atomic Balls of yore to the wimp shelves. Sure, you can still find quaint old faves like Sweetarts, but they're no fun unless they're spit out by a battery-powered mechanical spider. There's still plenty of gum around, but unless it's packaged inside a tube that shrieks when you shake it, what's the point?
Piles of other stuff are on the way, thanks to the positive-feedback loop involving kids who love weird things and the always-ready-to-serve candy and toy industries. But there's more to the story of novelty candy than the toy industry's mind-control skills, and I decided that certain questions had to be explored up close. Why exactly is candy taking such bizarre forms - from chocolate slugs to tiny, crack-vial-like dropper bottles of fluorescent, sour-liquid concentrate? Who are the demented geniuses who come up with these things? What's next? And why are simple sweets being varnished with an enticing Freudian coating of death, cannibalism, and suicide?
Seeking answers, I met and spoke with denizens of Candyland, talking with manufacturers, inventors, psychologists, trade-magazine editors, marketers, and cultural critics. I spoke to leaders at the cutting edge of each of the three main branches of novelty candy - interactive guys, megasour guys, and gross guys. Finally, risking self-inflicted diabetes, I hosted a party, a Saturday-morning Candypalooza, where I parceled out a 5-kilo stash of novelty candy to a dozen hand-picked youngsters. During this exercise, I felt like an operative in the US government's COINTELPRO MK-Ultra escapade of the '50s and '60s. In that one, CIA agents - often half-crocked on martinis themselves - administered LSD to unwitting subjects in social settings to see how they'd react.
I only hoped my results would be more illuminating than the CIA's.
Based in Abingdon, Virginia, BAAT Enterprises is one of the hottest candy-invention consulting outfits in the world. Its most successful brainstorm, the Spin Pop, has sold more than 60 million units at around three to five bucks per. BAAT also developed the Monster Mouth, the Twin Spin Pop, and the Rubber Chicken Pop, a candy resembling a dead chicken on a stick.
Some of the best toys and games - the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, Monopoly - were invented by toy-industry outsiders, and you can't get much further out than BAAT Enterprises, which was founded by Bill and Ann Schlotter and Tom and Ann Coleman, all former rural-route postal workers. Friends since 1965, the guys each married post office colleagues named Ann. While the two couples were happy enough in their jobs, they spent a lot of time dreaming up toy ideas that might create a craze as big as Pound Puppies or Cabbage Patch Kids.
On Halloween night in 1987, while Ann and Ann were taking their kids around the neighborhood, Bill and Tom stayed at the Colemans' house, doling out candy. One child came to the door carrying a Cyalume lightstick - those plastic rods filled with a chemical compound that glows brightly for several hours. The moment they saw it, the men looked at each other and said: "Glowing candy!"
After rigging up a prototype involving a penlight and a clear piece of hard candy, the foursome filed for a patent on a glowing sucker and began contacting every candy company they could find. They sent 75 letters, but only a few companies bothered to respond, most stiff-arming them utterly or saying they did their own R&D in-house. Then Tom Coleman saw an advertisement for the Impact Show, an annual inventors' confab in Pittsburgh.
The Schlotters and the Colemans went to the show, set up a display consisting of a large, dark box containing a Jetsons-esque mannequin holding three different-colored Glow Pops, and waited for lightning to strike. Which it did. An engineer with Cap Toys (a Hasbro division then based in Cleveland that became Cap Candy) happened by and went gonzo over the idea. He called his boss, the company flew the couples out to Cleveland, and they were quickly signed to a deal for the Glow Pop, which Cap renamed the Lazer Pop.
What's remarkable about the Lazer Pop and its hit sequel, the Spin Pop, is that they were the first really successful examples of interactive candy in almost 50 years. The genre's progenitor is, of course, Pez. Created in Vienna in 1927 as a breath mint (the name comes from the first, middle, and last letters of pfefferminz, German for "peppermint"), Pez was sold, starting in 1948, in a dispenser that looked like a plain cigarette lighter. Plastic heads of famous cartoon and comic-book characters were added in America in 1952. The concept was a natural kid magnet, but, almost inexplicably, for many years Pez stood as the sole example of a candy turned plaything.
BAAT Enterprises (named for Bill, Ann, Ann, and Tom) changed all that. The company has about a dozen products on the market and holds 22 patents, with approximately 10 more pending. BAAT has patents for double-spin pops, music-making candy, candy with lights that pulse in sync with the sounds around it, and candy-dispensing devices that look like Martian space probes.
Almost every BAAT concept has been manufactured by toy companies, not candy makers, an arrangement that makes perfect sense. Toy companies have the expertise to make and package plastic gimcracks, and the major-league candy companies (producers of famed candies like Pez, M&Ms, and Skittles) are only too happy to sign up with outfits like Hasbro. Within the biz, the consensus is that Hasbro's Cap Candy - which continues to work closely with BAAT - is the savviest of the interactive candy makers.
Cap Candy is situated in bucolic Napa, California, in a $25 million building that stands in flat geometric contrast to the piles of hay and cozy vineyards in the distance. With nary an identifying sign to be found, Cap's headquarters (which it shares with OddzOn Toys, another Hasbro division) could be anything from a power plant to a penitentiary. As I approach in a rental car, I'm dizzied and disoriented by its sheer vastness.
I'm greeted by Cap Candy's effervescent general manager, Tom Prichard. He's fortyish, lean and tall, with spiky hair and expensive-looking eyewear. As he guides me through the facility, I'm disappointed by the interior. Willy Wonka's chocolate factory it ain't - it's more like Dilbert's office building, with the main difference being that, here, the maze of cubicles is cluttered with hundreds of toys and gadgets.
But the offices aren't the whole story. Prichard stops next to a plain double door at the end of a long hall.
"This is our warehouse," he says, and opens the door to an enclosure so vast that I swear I can see fog at the far end, a quarter mile away. The building is a 360,000-square-foot behemoth used to store and preserve candy, and it's freezing inside. Everyone is wearing a parka; big, umbrella-shaped propane heaters sit next to desks and workstations, blasting away in an effort to maintain small pockets of warmth. All around are thousands of stacked boxes of M&Ms, Skittles, and Pez - ammo for toys like the Marvin the Martian Candy Hander - reaching toward a ceiling 40 feet up. As dozens of forklifts beep around us, Prichard shares one Wonka-ish detail: To get from one end of the building to the other, employees ride around on giant tricycles.
He points to the labels on the cardboard boxes, pleased that Cap is working with famous candy brands. "We need great-tasting candy and a cool toy," he says. "That's where we get synergy."
Back inside the Cap offices, Prichard takes me to a room where various novelty candies are laid out. I inspect several evolved species of the Spin Pop; one holds an entire roll of Life Savers. Another has a handle that looks like a garbage can with Sylvester the Cat standing in it. He's reaching up for Tweety Bird, who sits on a garbage-can lid that spins around Sylvester's head. The cat must have a hand-eye-coordination problem, because every time the bird comes near, he misses. It's like a candy version of the myth of Tantalus.
Next to the Spin Pops, there's an assortment of Monster Mouths, whose undercurrent of sensuality is juttingly obvious. "We've had sex therapists complain to us about the Monster Mouths, that we are corrupting our youth," Prichard says with a laugh.
BAAT Enterprises' Bill Schlotter told me once that when he and Tom Coleman showed the prototype of the Monster Mouth to their middle-aged friends, the reaction was, "That's an ugly tongue. Who is going to stick that in their mouth?" But when BAAT showed it to the then-president of Cap Toys, John Osher, he saw the beauty of it instantly. "Osher said, 'That is so strange, so gross,'" Coleman recalls. "'Kids are going to love to suck on another tongue.'"
A few minutes later we're joined by Steve Menow, Cap Candy's senior director of preliminary design, the closest thing the company has to an R&D czar. He's in his early thirties, with a weightlifter's build and short black hair. Menow says Cap gets most of its ideas from the "inventor community," whose members come to the company with "spit-and-chewing-gum ideas."
From that point, Menow's group refines the look, feel, and taste of an idea, hires a sculptor to make a prototype, and designs the packaging. Next, prototypes are tested on groups of kids. What sort of overarching truths have been gleaned from this process? Menow doesn't want to say: Novelty-candy people are no different about trade secrets than anyone else. "We try to stay up-to-date with trends around the country," he responds vaguely.
Cap Candy is a secretive place, and its executives absolutely refused to tell me anything about its new Star Wars line of interactive candy, which during my visit was months away from hitting the market and was being handled like a secret nuclear weapon. In fact, while Prichard and I spoke, a company attorney barged in to his office, flush-faced, and demanded that Prichard report everything he was "disclosing."
BAAT Enterprises is equally cagey. Coleman, for instance, declined to talk at all about new devices that might emerge from BAAT patents, saying only that "in the future, we hope to continue like we're doing."
The patents are on file, of course, and they hint at baroque splendors to come. The newest, issued January 19, 1999, is for something called a "Lava lazer licks candy holding and consumption device." The drawing looks like a lava lamp with a salt-shaker cap on top. There's a built-in flashlight to illuminate the sweet goo inside, which kids would suck out through the holes in the cap. Another patented concept, the "Candy holder and candy feeder device," sounds really elaborate, involving "a main housing which contains a motor, a power supply, a gearing system designed for the proper torque and speed, and a plastic or rubber belt."
If they ever emerge, these newfangled candy toys from BAAT Enterprises could make some lucky manufacturer very happy, because such devices generally come with a bonus: Kids will pay more for them. Cap's new Dilbert M&M dispenser costs $15. And from OddzOn, Cap Candy's sister company, comes SoundBites, the pop that plays tunes in your head by transmitting music recorded on a chip embedded in the holder. SoundBites sells for $10.
Hull, Iowa (population 1,700), is home to the King of Pain: Peter De Yager, an entrepreneur who turned kids of the Western world on to malic acid, one of the sourest edible substances known to humankind. This compound, which gives apples their tartness and wine its tangy quality, has long been used as a flavor enhancer for candy and other processed foods, but De Yager upped the prescription. In small amounts, malic acid provides a pleasant bite. In large doses, it transforms candy from a snack into an extreme sport, a form of commercially acceptable child masochism.
Mega Warheads are so vile that even De Yager admits they're "awful stuff," but he gets between 200 and 300 letters a week from kids who beg to differ. "There is not one day I haven't eaten a Warhead," wrote a fifth-grade girl. "I love them so much." The innocuous-looking pellets are about the size of almonds, but in your mouth they pack an invisible, highly potent wallop. After about 20 pain-ridden seconds, the thin three-acid coating (a blend of malic, absorbic, and citric acid) wears off, leaving a standard drop of hard candy.
Before becoming a Warheads warlord, De Yager - a former high school foreign-language teacher - had already established himself as a Gummy Bear magnate, amassing a fortune importing the chewable ursines after discovering them in Europe in 1979. In 1993, eager to invest his Gummy profits in something new, De Yager met with a salesperson pitching a product called Super Lemon.
"It was a round piece of lemon-flavored candy with a very, very sour coating," he recalls, energetically stressing each syllable. "It was so sour that most people would take it out of their mouth immediately, throw it in the wastebasket, and almost be angry at you. You thought you'd have an enemy for life."
Right away, De Yager began his search for the sour-candy fountainhead. He did some research and soon found that the candy was being imported from Japan, so he went on an "extreme-sour tour" of the Far East. De Yager discovered a wide variety of industrial-strength sour drops in Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. He found the most powerful drops in Taiwan and contracted a local factory to make the stuff for him. The company produced dozens of variations of flavor samples.
De Yager recalls one particular flight - during several back-and-forths between Taiwan and Iowa - when he was sitting in the first-class cabin of a 747 headed out of Taipei with a box full of samples marked "Cherry 1," "Cherry #2," "Lemon #3," et cetera. He couldn't wait till he got back to taste them, so he pulled out a notepad and began popping the candy in his mouth and scribbling reactions, oblivious to the stares from other passengers. When the flight attendant brought his meal, he took a bite and discovered that his taste buds were completely shot. "My mouth was gone," he recalls.
Inspired, he came up with a mascot named Wally Warhead - a kid with puckered lips and a mushroom cloud erupting from the top of his skull, his mind literally blown by malic acid. Introduced in 1993, Mega Warheads, like Gummy Bears, proved to be a hit that survived the transition from craze to cash cow. Today, De Yager employs nearly 200 people in Hull, and while he won't say how much money his privately held company brings in each year, he has called Warheads a "$40 million brand."
What's the appeal? There are many aspects, but kids obviously like Warheads in large part because adults hate them - that makes the torture worth the trouble. They're also a favored medium for tribal bonding, a social lubricant. They're small and inexpensive, and kids trade flavors and watch one another eat them during playground sour-offs. My 11-year-old stepniece, Callie, says, "Everybody in my class likes Warheads. We all like the taste of them, but the kids in my class all love the thrill and the adrenaline of it. Usually we'll have contests to see how many we can put in our mouth without throwing up. I've eaten five in one hour - after that your tongue gets all these sores on it."
My 6-year-old nephew, Calvin, can take three at a time. "You know how I do it?" he says. "I put them in my cheek."
Adult analysts tend to agree that extreme candy eating is a rite of passage. Lisbeth Echeandia, editor of the trade publication Confectioner, calls Warheads "a test of manhood." Paul Jose, an associate professor of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, says candies like Warheads invest the swallower with "a certain amount of power, because they have mastered this challenge. It's sort of like a hazing ritual."
The ritual will soon take on new forms. This summer Cap Candy will release three toys based on Mega Warheads, including a Wally Warhead Spin Pop. Earlier this year, Good Humor released a Wally Warhead ice cream pop. It's shaped like Wally's head, with a sour ice coating, an ice cream center, and a candy Warhead perched in Wally's mouth.
De Yager has yet to try one of those, and he doesn't seem to be in any hurry. "I burnt my mouth up years ago," he says.
Some novelty candies carry an unmistakable druggie motif. XStreme Ice Drops Sours, made by OraLabs in Denver, are crack-vial-sized bottles of liquid candy that you squeeze onto your tongue one drop at a time.
A small, obscure candy line known as Raven's Revenge appears to be straight out of Blade Runner - tubes of candy that look as if they were concocted in a street chemist's garage lab. Raven's Stinger is a test tube containing alternating layers of black and yellow powder. The Bomb is a bottle of pills that fizz in your mouth, staining your lips, teeth, gums, and tongue with black foam. Raven's Secret Lab is a chemistry set containing test tubes, droppers, and mixing vials for preparing edible concoctions. In 1997, a Simi Valley, California, PTA mom named Vicki Woodward decided that her 11-year-old son's tube of Raven's Revenge resembled cocaine. Like a Candyland Carry Nation, she went on an anti-Raven crusade, convincing one local store to take the powdered confections off its shelves.
Mayhem sells, too. The lure of extreme candy is pumped up even more by the use of images depicting explosions and electricity. A bag of Sour Punch Blue Raspberry Candy Straws is emblazoned with dazed funny faces, bolts of lightning shooting from their stupefied smiles. The wrapper on a tube of Shock Tarts is printed with anthropomorphized, discombobulated stars and lightning-bolt lettering. "Feel the Power!" it screams.
When youngsters nibble on Nestlé Nuclear Chocolate (a flat, molded bar containing "the explosive power of Pop Rocks popping candy") or a Nestlé Armageddon Asteroid ("a smashable milk chocolate asteroid with intense meteorite candy inside") they're proving how tough they are. But nuke candy just doesn't go down easy for some spoilsports. Last July, the Alliance for Survival, an antinuclear organization in Santa Monica, protested Nestlé's use of the word "nuclear" by staging a Nuclear Chocolate Meltdown. (In response, Nestlé issued a press release proving that it, at least, understands what kids want: "The word 'nuclear' is used in a fun, 'cool' manner. It is a common synonym among today's youth, like 'electric' and 'awesome.'")
Psychologists say candy themed around disasters, death, dismemberment, and creepy-crawlies appeals to kids because they're still trying to figure out the boundaries of their own bodies. Grade-schoolers go through a stage of development in which "there's a lot of anxiety and tension built up around bodily functions," says Paul Jose. "The same can be said about body-integrity issues - things like bleeding and wounds and things under the skin, and damage to the body."
Which may explain why, when kids eat Gummi Brains, they tend to lay them on the tongue bumpy side down - they don't want to miss a thing.
Bill Schlotter says he and the BAAT team don't bother consulting kids - aside from their own - to test-drive their candy ideas. Instead, they come up with inventions by channeling their inner child.
"We're a couple of 48-year-old boys," he says. "When we brainstorm, we try to hang our titles as 'adults' outside the room." He spends a lot of time watching cartoons as a 13-year-old would, poised to run with strange or icky ideas that come to mind. Television points to candy's future, and from what Schlotter sees, he says, "when you're talking about kids, I don't know if you can get too weird or gross."
I wondered about that, and after talking to the people who make their living inventing, making, selling, and speculating about candy, I decided it was time to meet the end users. On a recent Saturday afternoon, I invited a dozen boys and girls ages 8 to 12 to the Wired offices, where they feasted on De Yager's malic acid, Prichard's tongues, and more. Various companies participated, shipping sweetly aromatic, brightly colored loads via FedEx, which nimble volunteers loaded into a dozen booty bags filled with Candy Handers, Yuckers, Sprinkle Pops, Monster Mouths, Candy Bubbles (edible blow bubbles), Warheads, and Worm Pops (rock-hard suckers with real worms inside, produced by a California outfit called Hotlix).
Needless to say, the prospect was fearsome; playing it safe, we first plied the youth with pizza and milk. After they shoveled in this prebinge "food base," I asked the kids to play with candy items one at a time and taste them. Then I polled the general mood.
One drawback to toy-style extreme candy quickly emerged: It can be too complicated. The spring-loaded candy magazine of the Candy Handers - those little animated puppets that reach into a box and pull out a Pez or a Skittle - were murder, tending to sproing out of control and scatter candy all over. Once we got them together, though, the kids liked the results. "Man! It practically just gives it to you," said one boy, taking a Skittle from the Tasmanian Devil.
Yuckers, suckers with fake animal bodies and half bodies on the handles, got a couple of smiles but ended up back in the bag pretty quickly, leading to my second key observation: It appears that there's a "sweet spot" in interactive candy, somewhere between the one-yuck simplicity of a Yucker and the complexity of a Candy Hander. Here, greatness lies.
The Monster Mouth owns this zone. With its brilliant integration of candy, grossness, and manageable interactivity, it was the big hit of the day - with both boys and girls. "They're really neat," said one girl, "because your lollipop doesn't get dirty. You don't need to save the wrapper." True enough: When you're tired of licking the bumpy tongue, it retracts neatly back inside the monster's head. "You can eat it, then save it, then eat it again!" said one boy. The only dissenting note: One girl complained that the Godzilla Monster Mouth wasn't anatomically correct. "It should have a purple tongue," she sniffed.
My young candy experts loved the supersour Warheads, giggling and swapping flavors, but Hotlix's real-insect candy was considered just plain gross. Marketers, take note: Kids love candy that looks dangerous or disgusting - but only up to the point where the fake becomes real. Though fascinated by the larvae trapped safely inside a sucrose prison, the Wired tasters roundly rejected the idea of eating it. One brave 12-year-old finally consented to touching her tongue to the candy for purposes of a photo, but drew the line there. An 8-year-old boy said that for enough money, he'd be willing to eat the candy around the bug, provided his mouth never touched any part of the bug.
Toward the end of the exercise I asked the big question: What kind of candy would the kids invent if they ruled the world? Suggestions flew, with more of an emphasis on interactive features than sourness. Among the ideas: candy that explodes in your mouth; edible army men who shoot edible bullets; candy that makes your tongue glow in the dark; and candy that launches from a tube, deploying a parachute to descend safely into your mouth.
