I Don't Like Mystery Flavours Anymore

I'd like to call an end to "mystery flavoured", "guess the flavour", and "name that flavour" candies and snacks.  It's not an original concept, and frankly it's very lazy.  For those unfamiliar, this is a trend that started about 10 years ago,  and has gone on strong ever since.  It's most common in potato chips, but I've seen it in other snacks and candy as well.  What this mystery flavour trend is, is a snack in a package, often covered in question marks, with no flavour listed anywhere. Instead of a named flavour the company labels the snack a "mystery" flavour, and sometimes offers the purchaser of the snack the opportunity to name the flavour themselves.  What you're getting is a flavour that the snack companies research and development team found tasty, but couldn't put a finger on what exact flavour it was.

What they do instead is get you to figure that out.  While I'm sure the marketing people at these snack companies would say that they're being "interactive", to me it just comes off as lazy.  There's a very interesting and challenging part of creating a new flavour, and it's about recognition.  If you eat a candy that's supposed to taste like apple, but instead it tastes like blueberry, your brain is going to set off some harsh warning signals.  Your brain may even go so far as to tell you that this apple has gone bad because it doesn't taste like an apple. Even if you like blueberry, and this is the best blueberry candy ever, your brain might tell you that it's gross because of  the expectation of apple flavouring.

This is something that marketing departments at snack companies have to get perfectly right every single time.  If they market a snack with a particular theme, and the flavour doesn't match in our heads with that theme, then it could lead to a complete failure of the snack. New Coke might have worked out perfectly if they didn't market it as a "better" version of Coke. If they had sold it as a different cola instead of a Coke replacement, we might still be drinking it today.  Flavour, and smell (which are very connected in our brains) are connected to our memories in a very strong way. If you smell cinnamon it might evoke memories of Christmas, if you smell pumpkin spice, you immediately think of fall no matter what the season.

This is why it's so important for these snack companies to get the theme and the flavour to match perfectly. When you read a package, your brain is preparing itself before you even take one bite.  If the description on the package does not match at all, then you could be in for a horrible experience no matter how "good" the snack actually is.  There are a few cases where candy companies will actually use this for their own benefit.  Some snack companies make treats that are purposefully the wrong colour for the flavour, to mess with our heads.  Why these snacks don't affect us as negatively is that they advertise it on the package, they warn our brains that something is going to be wrong.

Snack companies are making treats, and rather than taking the risk of labeling them a particular flavour, they're intentionally telling us that they don't have one in mind.  They're taking the easy way out of a very difficult and expensive part of the snack making process.  While this may seem like a clever idea, the problem I have is that every company seems to have a new "mystery" flavour every year.  It's a trend that grew old imediately after the first time it was done.

I don't eat snacks to solve a mystery, I eat snacks to satisfy my craving for whatever flavour I've been offered.  Sometimes I'm interested in trying new things, but I want to try new things that have a name, not a question mark.

CC