Who doesn't love a good mystery? A movie, television show, or book that keeps you on your toes and guessing is always an intriguing, captivating experience, and it's no different with food and drinks. Like playing the game of "Clue," most people are determined to correctly identify the culprit, or flavor, that so mysteriously evades them. In 1993, Airheads (a chewy candy inspired by the ) became one of the first companies to introduce a Mystery flavor to its lineup of sweets, and fans loved the challenge.
Airheads' White Mystery flavor isn't actually a single, signature flavor. It's a combination of several Airheads flavors that might include cherry, strawberry, watermelon, grape, green apple, orange, and blue raspberry from one day to the next. The creation is actually a brilliant example of marketing and business efficiency.
Of course, fans of any product are eager to try something new and fun, and adding a bit of mystery to the mix is a smart way to entice buyers. But the real slick move here is that Airheads doesn't have to stop production in between creating different flavors. Instead of pausing and cleaning the machinery between rounds of, say, cherry and grape, it keeps on churning out candies but withholds the food dye so that the candies turn out white.
So the mystery flavors are essentially mashups of whichever flavors are being produced at any given time. A piece of fan mail inspired the mystery flavor In the early 1990s, Matthew Fenton was the Assistant Brand Mana.
