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Necco Puts Fake Ingredients Back Into Candy After Customers Complain
By
Jamie Feldmar
Published Oct 27, 2011
Modified Oct 27, 2011
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By
Jamie Feldmar
Published Oct 27, 2011
Modified Oct 27, 2011
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When Necco Wafers, the dry-as-chalk candies beloved by many a septuagenarian, decided to change their original recipe to include "natural" flavors and colors, they thought they were just staying hip to the know. But the plan totally backfired, as thousands of angry customers hounded the company to go back to their original, artificial ways.
"Our normal mail volume probably went up twenty-fold," Necco VP Jeff Green told NPR. The vast majority of customers said something along the lines of, "You ruined my product, I will never buy anything from you again." People complained about everything: “The colors were bland. The taste was bland. My theory is that if it wasn’t broken, it shouldn’t have been fixed. They proved it," one lifelong fan told the Boston Globe. Sales dropped by 35 percent.
So, two years into an ill-fated taste experiment, the company is going back to their fake, sugary, original ways. Green guesses that the shift alienated Necco's "older demographic," a theory grandmothers across the nation empirically support. "When you're tampering with the family jewels for [the first time in] 150 years," Green said, "we expected some fallout. I don't think we expected it to be quite what it was."
Tagged
all natural
artificial flavor
candy
fail
necco wafers
outrage
sugar
Jamie Feldmar
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