The Secret to “Mystery Flavored” Candy

Yes, I’m looking at you Dum Dums and Airheads (I mean the candies, not you reading this)!

Many of my childhood fights hinged upon guessing the true identity of a candy’s mystery flavor. Lollipops, or dumdums as some say, just taunted me with those question marks printed all over the wrapper.

Airheads were no better, with their mystery flavor having non-descript white packaging. One day I would be certain the mystery flavor was coconut, and the next time I would find myself fighting for fruit punch!

Well my nostalgic friends, the guessing game is over, and I’m sorry to say the truth takes a bit of the magic out of the mystery flavor game.

Like so many things in this world, the creation of the mystery flavor was based on maximizing profits.

Imagine you work at a candy factory. You’re currently making a blueberry flavored product, but need to change over to watermelon.

You could shut down the equipment, clean it thoroughly, then start everything back up to make your watermelon batch, but from a business standpoint this is a loss of production time and money.

Or, as your finishing up the blueberry batch you add the watermelon mix anyways. The end of the blueberry batch will inevitably mix with the beginning of the watermelon…