All I want for my birthday is a pack of mint chocolate chip Extra Dessert Delights chewing gum. I dearly miss this variant of Extra gum, and I hope they bring it back one day. Fun flavors from this iconic (and discontinued) lineup included: Mint Chocolate Chip, Strawberry Shortcake, Apple Pie, Orange Creme Pop, Rainbow Sherbert, Root Beer Float, Cinnamon Roll, Lemon Square, Bananas Foster, Peach Cobbler, Raspberry Vanilla Cupcake, and Key Lime Pie. Real question: should I order some on Poshmark?
I don’t remember if Extra Dessert Delights was originally targeted towards the skinny-core diet-culture enthusiasm that characterized the early 2000s. However, it reached my elementary school, and we were all obsessed with it. I still recall that jaw-aching, short-lasting burst of “authentic” mint chocolate chip ice cream flavor.
I’ve been thinking about Extra Dessert Delights often lately. I was checking out at Target the other day when I noticed the updated gum display hovering over the self-checkout counter. I was disappointed that Trident Tropical Twist, probably my all-time favorite gum flavor, was also missing from the display. Unlike Extra Dessert Delights, I trusted that Tropical Twist would be a classic forever flavor. Moreover, my old familiar favorites like 5 Gum, Stripe, and Extra were all gone too. Where did they go? What is their fate?
I’ve done some research, and there’s an easy answer and a complicated answer to this. The easy answer is that a lot of chewing gum brands have been driven out of the United States, and that’s why they’re not in stores. Mondelez International, the food giant that owns brands like Dentyne, Trident, and Stride, sold most of its gum business in 2022 and took the rest of their brands out of the US, Canada, and Europe. It’s shocking to me that Mondelez ever did this, but the numbers don’t lie. This Statista graph shows that chewing gum consumption has been in a steady decline in the last decade.
Where did this decline come from? Now comes the complicated answer. To answer this, we have to take a look at the only timeline that matters: Candystand.com. That’s right, I suspect the death of Candystand.com played a significant role in the fall of chewing gum marketing, causing the industry to lose its most engaged consumer base.
Bear with me, this is probably only 5% of the real answer, but it’s fun to investigate and explore the potential connections.
Here’s a timeline of everything we know so far:
- December 1997: Candystand.com is launched.
- September 2008: Wrigley sells Candystand.com to Funtank.
- December 2009: Angry Birds is Released.
- April 2012: Candy Crush Saga is released.
- February 2016: Publishers Clearing House acquires Funtank and Candystand.com.
- July 2017: Adobe deprecates Flash and announces end-of-life support.
- December 2020: End-of-life support for Adobe Flash ends.
- December 2022: Mondelez International sells Trident and other gum brands to Perfetti Van Melle.
What was Candystand.com, you ask? Only the greatest website to ever grace the internet. Sometimes I go on the Wayback Machine and just stare at it, knowing all too well that it will never be interactive or playable again.
Candystand.com was an online gaming website that hosted over 100 Adobe Flash/Shockwave games, all playable on a web browser. According to Wikipedia, it was originally launched in 1997 by LifeSavers Company, who used the website to launch advergames and redefine marketing in the digital age.
Adobe Flash is a type of software used for game development in the early 2000s. It was a low-code software, which made Flash games easier to produce and roll out than HTML/JS-type games. This allowed companies to iterate quickly and get good games online. I whole-heartedly commend the early Candystand.com game developers for bringing candy and chewing gum to life.
I remember being introduced to Candystand.com by a family friend; we played Awesome Blossom, a tile-matching puzzle game, for hours on end. Years later, Sour Patch Stunt Crew became my new favorite. I chewed on Trident Layers, a mid-recession delicacy, while I worked in the Trident Layers Factory. I savored a LifeSaver while playing LifeSavers Mini Golf Classic.
I was a sucker (pun intended) for this type of marketing, and the research seems to show that this worked on a larger scale too.
According to a study done by van Berlo, van Reijmersdal, and Eisend (accessible at this link), people who play advergames usually have a better attitude towards the brand and have a positive emotional response. Furthermore, this other study by Folkvord and van ‘t Riet referenced in the publication proved that advergames have a positive effect on consumers’ intent to purchase.
Granted, van Berlo et. al’s study disclaimed that younger audiences were more likely to be persuaded. They were also more likely to remember the game than the brand, meaning they were engaged but fallible. Nevertheless, this shows that advergames do play a role in creating a strong consumer base engaged with the brand. Advergames play a role in purchasing candy/chewing gum too, at least a neutral role and at most a positive one.
Candystand.com was my after-school haven, and then it died.
Publishers Clearing House took over Candystand.com in February 2016. They acquired Funtank, the previous owner of the website, and, naturally, took down almost all of the Flash games. They still have some games on their website today, but the focus is on gambling-type games like poker and blackjack, and they’ve all lost their original flavor. Sour Patch Stunt Crew is gone forever, and so is my sanity. There’s one pinball-style game listed on PCH Games under the “Candystand Arcade” section, but I played it, and it has none of the sweet charm of the original website.
I don’t understand why Publishers Clearing House took a kid’s website and turned it into a money-making scheme. I suppose the answer there is capitalism and the inevitable loss of control that comes with acquisition. Their website is overflowing with ads now in a way Candystand.com never was, not very classy. It’s very depressing.
One solution would have been to pull the original Flash games onto another website like Kongregate, However, Adobe Flash also pulled support for Flash games around this time, declaring End-Of-Life support would last until 2020 (Wikipedia).
It has now come to my attention that Adobe was justified in killing Flash, due to major security flaws, accessibility issues, lack of mobile support, and suspicious flash cookies. Nevertheless, I am still heartbroken all the same. Flash Game History displays a beautiful tribute to Flash games, showing how they shaped the video game industry and the lives of millions of people worldwide. I hear you can play old Adobe Flash games via the Ruffle Flash simulator; it doesn’t work on my computer yet but I’ll keep trying.
I still blame Publishers Clearing House for this whole mess, although perhaps misguidedly. To be fair, Wrigley, one of the major chewing gum brands in America, lost its right to marketing gum through online games when it sold the website to Funtank in 2007 (per Wikipedia). It’s unclear why Wrigley sold Candystand.com to Funtank in 2007. The website was successful at the time, and mobile phones were just barely on the rise with the release of the original iPhone that year.
It’s a blessing that Funtank kept the candy/gum games on its website until 2010 when it was bought by Publishers Clearing House. It’s even more of a miracle that they allowed the website to run for six more years.
It’s possible that Publishers Clearing House took down Candystand.com because there was a decline in demand for online games in general. Angry Birds and Candy Crush are the new Fire and Ice and Lifesavers Mini Golf. I too started to focus more on mobile gaming applications and social media as the 2010s progressed. The death of Adobe Flash was even more of a push to abandon web-based gaming.
The push towards mobile gaming seems to align with the decline in the chewing gum industry. This article at The Guardian affirms that we don’t need gum to distract us anymore; we have tiny devices that do that for us now. I suppose this is true; when there’s an endless world of distraction at our fingertips, who needs to spend their idle time and money on candy? Moreover, in an increasingly digital and decentralized world, who needs to buy gum as an impulse buy in the checkout line? Who cares about web-based PC games, let alone advergames.
One could argue that Candy Crush Saga offers a sweet alternative to the advertising posed by Candystand.com, with its glossy gummy bears and juicy orange lozenges. However, I would disagree and say that the lack of named branding voids any sort of advertising mission. Candy Crush Saga’s seeming monopoly on the candy-themed mobile game space made it all but impossible for chewing gum/Candystand-esque advergames to make it on mobile. Nevertheless, they didn’t even try.
Our increasingly digital world was further exaggerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to this article at Quartz, COVID-19 is another likely culprit in the more recent decline of chewing gum. The article compares the growth of the gum industry to pre-COVID levels, saying, “Unit sales went up by less than 1% last year, totaling about 1.2 billion units, which is still 32% less than the amount moved in 2018.” It’s likely that work-from-home policies, market pressure, and remote socialization made it easier for stressed consumers to ditch gum and stay at home.
As the economy continues to recover back from the pandemic, I’m curious to see how gum will resurge from all of this, if at all. The Quartz article suggests that chewing gum would need to be rebranded as a mental wellness product in order to see success these days. Cucumber lemon chewing gum, anyone?
As for the argument of devices replacing chewing gum idle time, I would argue that people are starting to revert to the opposite. These days, I’m mostly off my phone, with the exception of an occasional Subway Surfers run or Bejeweled Blitz rush. And yet, I would sacrifice both of these apps and more for just one more run at Sour Patch Stunt Crew. Maybe I would buy more Sour Patch Kids, too.
Less scrolling on my phone lately means I’m more present when I stand in line at the store today, leaving my eyes to wander on the gum display once more. I bought about 10 packs of gum at CVS this morning; five Trident Tropical Twist and five Trident Watermelon Twist. I’m not afraid to single handedly bring back the gum industry. It is a burden I will carry loudly on this blog.
