Mentos

This article is about the mint and fruit-flavored candy. For the Jamaican musical style, see Mento.

A number of different Mentos flavors

Mentos is a popular brand of candy sold in many markets across the world by the Perfetti Van Melle Corporation. Mentos was first produced in the Netherlands during the 1950s. The candies are small oblate spheroids, with a slightly hard exterior and a soft, chewy interior. They are sold in rolls which typically contain 14 candies, although the new "Sour Mix" flavour contains only 11. Certain flavours are sold in boxes in the United States, and the rolls in three and six-packs. The slogan of Mentos is "the freshmaker". Most Mentos packages describe the candy as "chewy dragees".

Flavors

Mentos is available in a variety of flavors, the most common being mint and mixed fruit, an assortment of orange, strawberry, and lemon. Mentos first appeared as a liquorice-flavored candy which can still be purchased in the Netherlands as "Drop Mentos". New flavors were initially test-marketed in the Netherlands and throughout Europe, but more recently, most flavors are available worldwide.

Mentos Sugar Free

Other flavours include green apple, cinnamon, strawberry, tropical fruit (which contains a mix of strawberry, orange, and lemon flavors), grape, wintergreen, raisin, grapefruit, peach, spearmint, strawberry yoghurt, lemon yoghurt, red orange, currant and two versions of black licorice flavored Mentos. Two varieties of the mint flavor, known as "Mentos Strong" and "Air action Mentos" are sold in the Netherlands. Chocolate Mentos were produced in 1989, but the flavor was discontinued. In 2006, the citrus mango flavor was introduced to the Japanese market. A new product line, Mentos Sours have recently become available in the United States, featuring Watermelon, Green Apple, and Lemon flavors.

Mentos gum is also available in the Netherlands in blisters and bottles, both in three different flavours.

In August 2005, Mentos began running TV ads announcing a new sugar-free variety of the candy which comes in "mixed berries" and "cool mint" flavors sweetened with Splenda.

Commercials

Part of Mentos' popularity can be attributed to its campy commercials, which debuted in late 1992 on American television. In the commercials, individuals facing various day-to-day dilemmas consume Mentos and are subsequently inspired to solve their problems at hand in a creative, often humorous fashion.

Dilemmas presented included a woman who breaks her shoe-heel and a man who gets paint on his new business suit after sitting down on a freshly-painted bench. After consuming a Mentos, the female character proceeds to break off the heel to her other undamaged shoe, and the man rolls around on the still-wet bench, creating a pinstripe pattern on his suit. These unusual behaviors are typically witnessed by nearby, sometimes antagonistic characters, and a roll of Mentos is boisterously displayed by the commercial's respective protagonist to the observer as an explanation for their actions.

Many North American viewers believed that the 1990s commercials, with their unfamiliar and rather naive style, had been imported -- perhaps from Northern Europe, the candy's home.

The commercials have been widely parodied in popular culture. In a vignette from an episode of Family Guy, John Wilkes Booth botches the assassination of Abraham Lincoln until assisted by a candy called "Mintos" which is presented with the Mentos slogan, "the freshmaker." The Foo Fighters' 1996 music video "Big Me" also parodied the Mentos commercials, using an imaginary candy called Footos. In this video, the methods employed to solve problems are virtually direct copies of those portrayed in the actual commercials. There exist also a number of amateur-made parodies on the World Wide Web. Mentos were also parodied in the Leslie Nielsen movie Wrongfully Accused and the movie Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, and also in a host segment on the cult classic television series Mystery Science Theater 3000. A TV ad for Democratic Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont featuring blogger Markos Moulitsas was re-cut by various bloggers into a parody of a Mentos commercial.

Recent American commercials for Mentos have diverged from the widely-parodied format entirely, and feature a rendition of 2 Unlimited's No Limit.

Competing brands

• A similar candy in the U.S., called "Chewz", is manufactured by Lance, Inc. Mentos fans have jokingly referred to this as the "anti-Mentos".
• Trebor Softmints and Softfruits, introduced in 1981 and sold in the UK and Ireland by Cadbury-Schweppes are also similar to Mentos, although with softer exterior coatings.

Eruptions

Main article: Mentos eruption

Due to its high surface area, Mentos expedites a rapid release of carbon dioxide when dropped into a carbonated liquid. Also, the small dents in the surface of the candy provide a great site for nucleation, which is how the carbon dioxide molecules can escape so fast. The escaping bubbles quickly turn into a raging foam, and the pressure can build dramatically in a restricted container such as a two-liter bottle. As explained on an episode of MythBusters, diet sodas (particularly colas due to their visible brown color) are most commonly used for the experiment. People are often under the illusion that aspartame causes the reaction, but this is not so. The only reason that people use diet sodas is because it doesn't get everything sticky. The resulting geyser (popularly known as a mentos eruption) can shoot as high as 6 meters (20 feet). The record in the hit show MythBusters reached was over 34 feet with the use of a nozzle.

Rumors of deaths

In November, 2006, the Urban Legends Reference Pages (aka Snopes) addressed the rumors of people dying from eating Mentos and drinking cola. Their research found that while eating Mentos and drinking cola can result in people regurgitating the foamy result (as evidenced by numerous online videos), no actual news accounts exist anywhere of anyone dying from it.

External links

• Official Mentos website
• Unofficial Mentos FAQ
• Mentos commercial filmography