Patti at Candy Yum-Yum recently posted about giant peppermint sticks from Great Big Stuff. As you can see, the kid in the picture has a hard time even wielding the stick. It looks like a cudgel, like my brother the police officer might carry. If that’s not “fun size” I don’t know what is. Upon looking further, I discovered that Great Big Stuff also has a ten-pound chocolate bar. Great big indeed. For a little under $50 you get the chocolate and a custom-printed wrapper. I guess this is for gift purposes. If I were buying this for myself, I might just have the label say, “This is a great big chocolate bar. Pace yourself.”
This got me curious about whether other companies were doing similar things. I remember my coworkers buying giant chocolate bars when we went on a Hershey factory tour a few months ago but those were only five pounds. Sure, that’s really big, but it is dwarfed in comparison to the previous one. I found that Hershey’s also has a giant hollow Kiss filled with tiny Kisses. I am not sure how I feel about that. This is like the mother pod sprouting seeds that will grow into Kiss trees and make more pods. It’s part of the circle of life. Should we really eat them? Again, I will have to contact my old ethicist boss Tom Regan on this score, as I have made note to do before.
Note that this particular Kiss is customized to say, “Mark, I love you this much!” Of course, you can have that customized to whatever you want. Nothing against Mark. I am sure he is a swell guy but I just don’t feel that way about him.
I did a search for giant candy and found all manner of stuff I did not know existed. Three-pound lollipops, one-pound Sugar Daddies, 12-ounce gummy bears, one-pound jawbreakers that might actually do the trick their name implies. All this was a little shocking to me. Maybe I live in a closet or else I am just not up on what the young people are doing nowadays, but this was all new to me.
Have you ever given or received giant candy as a gift?
9:52 am on December 16th, 2008
I got a one-pound Sugar Daddy in a secret Santa gift exchange. It’s terrifyingly large.
10:05 am on December 16th, 2008
yikes! How long would that take to eat, do you figure?
3:12 pm on December 16th, 2008
My guess is 5 years!
5:01 pm on December 16th, 2008
I am fascinated by this – I think if you have a food product and are not too creative, three ways to sell more are to 1.) make it bigger (I’m waiting for silver dollar size M % M’s) 2.) make it smaller (everybody has a mini version these days) and 3.) cover it in chocolate (Oreos). I should add another – turn it inside out (Reese’s, Junior Mints). Marketing is so interesting! Oh – I have see the giant gummy bears and they are scary. These were huge – the size of a small baby. Creepy.
5:42 pm on December 16th, 2008
Denise, I have two more–
1. Make it sour (Gummi Worms, Blow Pops, Starburst, Skittles)
2. Make it “gourmet” (M&M’s, Hershey’s, etc…)
10:28 pm on December 16th, 2008
We had 2-3 of those giant candy cane sticks when I was a kid. Those things were SOLID! About 2 inches thick, 2 feet long I guess. We used them as decorations at Christmas.
Although, I think once they took a hammer to it and made home made peppermint ice cream.
12:02 pm on January 12th, 2009
[...] were, but that’s a comparative judgment. A full-size Snickers bar felt in my hand like a giant cudgel and could almost be used as a walking stick. That was a full meal back in the day. I did not save [...]