Necco Fans Prefer Their Candy Artificially Enhanced

Natural schmnatural! Bring back the yummy goodness of artificial ingredients!

You'd think that most people would prefer their favorite food to be made from natural ingredients, but not Necco Wafers fans. When the company changed their recipe to use natural flavors and colors, the fans clamored for the return of the original, artificially enhanced candy:

Perhaps the problem for Necco, which was founded in 1847, is that, chemicals and all, many people do recognize Necco Wafers as food.

"A stronger part of our customer base is probably an older demographic," Green says. "And that's the part of it that we alienated."

He says that the all-natural shift prompted people to send stories about using the wafers to practice for communion wafers, or poker chips — even, reportedly, to fool tollbooths in Chicago.

"People were reminding us of what they grew up with," he says.

And maybe that's part of the reason people like eating them — to trigger old memories, and to eat a candy that promises neither to be a "brain food" nor an answer to life's problems. It's just a little candy wafer that's sweet, and unnaturally attractive.

NPR has the story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/10/26/141732915/customer-outrage-forces-necco-to-put-artificial-ingredients-back-into-wafers?ft=1&f=100