Dum Dum Lollipops

[blondestwolf]

OK, the "Mystery" flavor. Isn't it really "Surprise"? It's just one of the regular flavors wrapped up in the Mystery wrapper, so once you get it open and taste it, you can figure out what flavor it is. Does that really count as a mystery

Comments

[badoingdoing]

I also read somewhere that that's the wrapper they put on for the dum-dums that come out of the machine as they're changing over flavor mixes, but that might be old info or not true or something.

[blondestwolf]

Aha! That's what they say in the Wikipedia article! That's also a plausible interpretation of what they say on the Dum Dum Pop site. They are not very specific and there's a lot of wiggle room in their statement...

The Mystery Flavor™ is a secret. We can only reveal that the Mystery Flavor continuously changes and is not limited to current Dum Dum flavors. It's up to Dum Dum fans to guess the flavor of these mysterious pops.

Anyway, that sort of stuff seems to happen in the food industry all the time. My dad does some work for a large dairy company, and when they get the balance wrong on a batch of a plainer flavor of ice-cream, they just turn it into chocolate, since it's such an overwhelming flavor. No one notices that it was supposed to be vanilla.

[wormulus]

According to Spangler Candy's trivia (spangler owns Dum Dum), the mystery flavor is actually a combination of any two flavors in the bag and results from the overlap in switching the machines over from one flavor to another. From a $$ perspective and an engineering/logistics one, that makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is the fact that their website doesn't agree with itself.

[blondestwolf]

Oh yeah, that totally makes sense in terms of logistics. Still, where do you stand on the issue of calling it a "Mystery"? I'm wavering!

[wormulus]

Because you don't know which two were crossed! And maybe you can't tell what it actually tastes like?

[baniszew]

This is not entirely relevant to candy, but it reminds me of a time in 2.008 when we wanted to use yellow plastic in the injection molder and the previous group had used green. We were molding a sun shaped part. The in-between combination color was this really amazing bronze. We managed to mold about half a dozen parts from it. I really wish we'd been able to recreate it to make more parts from it.