Why do peppermints get holes

One thing that helped? Noble replaced Crane's impractical cardboard packaging with a thinner tin and later aluminum foil roll that also kept the candies dry. Noble made a number of innovative marketing moves in order to expand sales, including having his clients strategically place Life Savers next to the registers of restaurants, saloons, and grocery stores, and training his clients to always provide a nickel when giving change.

With the rolls of breath mints sitting right there boasting that they were only 5 cents, and a newly received nickel in the hands of the customer, the candy practically sold itself. The low price-point continued as a selling point for decades as Life Savers started advertising their candies as "Still Only 5 Cents! To keep the mints in high production during this period, other candy manufacturers donated their sugar rations to the company.

The original fruity flavors—lemon, lime, orange, cherry, and pineapple—were introduced in and remained untouched for almost 70 years. In , Life Savers altered their five-flavor roll by replacing lemon and lime with raspberry and watermelon. Life Savers had also swapped out orange for blackberry, but the change was short-lived.

More than two million people had voted for the flavor swaps in an online poll, but poor blackberry turned out to be an unwanted addition. Orange was quickly added back to the lineup. Life Savers has introduced quite a number of flavors, minty and otherwise, over the years, from Cl-O-ve and Cinn-O-mon to the ever-popular Butter Rum. Hence, you get holes. Pre-manufactured holes! Hard peppermint candy is nothing but colored sugar syrup kneaded together with peppermint oil.

The kneading seems to create air pockets, so bubbles may be a sign of quality: thorough kneading. Or quick and sloppy. Where do you think the holes in your teeth come from, if not from out of your candy? Just spit the holes out.

I have nothing to add but the obligatory link to the related Why do wintergreen Life Savers spark when crunched? The idea that the mints have little air pockets in them that become the holes sounded pretty likely to me, so I decided to try and confirm it with a little experimentation. So now my desk is convered with dissected mint fragments, and I can definitively report that mints do indeed have small air pockets in them, but they are quite tiny conmpared to the swiss-cheese effect that I was so troubled by.

At this point, the most likely explanation seems to be the presence of small air pockets which weaken the surrounding mint material, leading to relatively large holes. Close, but more likely the tiny air pockets provide more surface area for your saliva to attack and dissolve. At some time or another, it seems everyone has encountered Life Savers at some point in their life. Whether it was the mint Life Savers or the fruity or chewy versions, there's always a point in childhood when the candy surfaces.

For others, the holidays just are not complete until stockings are filled with at least one Life Saver book via Old Time Candy. While the candy now comes in many flavors and even a gummy variety , Life Savers were not always as kid-friendly as they are now.

In fact, they were first sold as "breath savers" and were manufactured by a pharmaceutical pill maker.