Want.

It’s been a good week for new Mentos sightings. I found another new roll (or new packaging at least) in CVS today. The candy is the regular Mentos mint flavor, but the roll has a heart in place of the “O” in “Mentos,” and instead of the normal “Mint” text, it says, “Kiss Me.” I assume these are tied to the Mentos Kiss Fight campaign, or are special wrappers for Valentines Day.

Update: After eating the entire roll (because that’s how I roll… Ha!), I noticed that there were two pink Mentos mixed in with the white mint ones. The pink Mentos taste like mint, but are pink in color, just like the strawberry you find in the mixed fruit rolls. After noticing that, I think this roll is a game you play with someone you like. You pass the roll back and fourth, and whoever gets the pink Mentos has to kiss the other person, or get kissed by the other person. It’s kind of the Mentos equivalent to spin the bottle, or mistletoe.

I was meeting a friend for lunch a few weeks ago on the health sciences campus at The University of Iowa. We were grabbing a sandwich in the EMRB Cafe when I happened across a heavenly roll of Mentos that made my entire day. There was a display stand on the checkout counter with rolls of the new Mentos Rainbow flavor. I originally posted about them last year when they showed up in the UK. After seeing some ads on TV about the rainbow rolls, I figured it was only a matter of time before they made it to our side of the pond.

The rolls include seven different flavors, with four of them being flavors not available in any other rolls available in the US. The nice thing about the rainbow rolls, is you get two candies of each flavor, and they’re in the exact order that you see on the package, so there are no surprises.

Flavors

• Strawberry – these are currently available in their own rolls or in mixed fruit rolls.
• Pineapple – these are new to the US, and area a very sweet pineapple flavor with a bit of an odd aftertaste.
• Grape – these are one of my favorite flavors of Mentos (not currently available in the US), and have a very powerful sweet grape flavor.
• Raspberry – these are also new the the US, and are a flavor I’ve never had before from anywhere.
• Orange – these are currently available in mixed fruit rolls.
• Cherry – this flavor was added a few years back to the mixed fruit boxes of Mentos (not available in any rolls).
• Watermelon – these are a new flavor, and are probably my favorite addition to the rainbow rolls.

All in all, the rainbow rolls are a great mix of Mentos. Of all the different types available in the US currently, the rainbow rolls provide the most variety and are probably my favorite Mentos buy at the moment. If you happen to come across rainbow Mentos, definitely buy a roll… or two… or three.. or ten!

Not only does Mentos create some pretty awesome candies, but their marketing group creates some fun websites. Check out their latest interactive site, the Mentos Beatbox. Take a few photos of your face in the various stages of beatbox with your webcam, and the site will set you up with a pretty sweet video of you rocking a beat. You can download the video, or embed it into your various social networking sites. You can see me dropping the mad beats below.

Paste the URL to your own beatbox in the comments.

A couple pieces of Mentos media (a video and comic) have been in the news the past few days for  winning a couple awards.

The first is from a Mentos Fresh Goes Better contest on deviantART. The contest provides a template with a “before Mentos” box on the left, and an “after Mentos” box on the right.

Everyone knows Fresh Goes Better with Mentos, but did you know that since 1991 they’ve also made countless situations better? That’s right, the simple act of popping a single Mentos mint into your mouth, helps enhance and improve circumstances and events of all kinds. The equation is simple. Bland, boring, and average quickly become flavorful, exciting, and amazing once Mentos enters the mix. Help make your day great with the addition of Mentos!

You can view contest entries in this deviantART collection. An artist form Wilsonville, Oregon looks to have won 2nd place in the contest.

The second Mentos award was from UTalkMarketing.com for a Mentos commercial where a spider does some unexpected things which is supposed to represent the predictability of a roll of “Mentos Rainbow” candy. You know what’s going to come next since they follow the colors of the rainbow.

The Guinness World Record for Mentos and Diet Coke has been broken yet again, this time by the Tour College of Changchun University in China. The previous record was set by Turbia University for 1911 fountains. The new record was set with 2175 fountains.

“We ordered 2,450 packs of sweets from a local supermarket, and the day before the event, we had to unwrap them all, put them on skewers and then wrap them again to stop them melting in the heat.”

Those crazy guys at Eppybird have done it again. They’re the guys who brought you the amazing Mentos fountains. This time around they’re using Coke Zero (apparently it works as good as Diet Coke) and Mentos to make a rocket car. 108 bottles of Coke Zero and 648 Mentos propel the car (and driver) 212 feet. One word… awesome!

(you can also check out their early experiments)

I wish our band did things like this in high school. Vestavia Hills High School attempted to break the Coke and Mentos fountain world record yesterday at their high school football stadium. The existing record was set on June 19, 2008, by 1,911 students in Latvia. Unfortunately they weren’t able to break the record. The event looked to be a fund raiser ($5 to participate) for the band’s trip to London later this year. They only had about 500 participants with two soda bottles apiece. You have to give it to them, it is definitely a unique way to raise money for their band trip. I would have totally participate in this when I was in high school band. Heck, if it weren’t 1500 miles away, I would have paid my $5 and participated in this attempt. You can see more photos of the attempt on the Band’s Facebook Page, and from The Birmingham News. Maybe I need to put together my own Mentos fountain world record attempt.

It looks like Mentos are doing pretty well in Great Britain. According to a recent press release, a new type called “Mentos Rainbow” will start to show up on shelves.

Mentos is now the largest brand within Perfetti Van Melle with an impressive brand awareness of 68% after being launched just 3 years ago.  In 2008 Mentos Mint was the fastest growing mint product in the UK confectionery market.

Building on the success of Mentos Fruit and Mint in the UK, Perfetti Van Melle are launching a limited edition Mentos Rainbow. Each roll will contain an exciting mix of 7 fruit flavours (grape, strawberry, orange, watermelon, pineapple, raspberry and apple) all made with real fruit juice.

What’s more, consumers are guaranteed to get two chews of each flavour in every pack.

Is there anyone going to the UK any time soon who can pick me up a roll or two?

Sometime over the past few weeks, Mentos has updated their website. They’ve got a much more interactive site now. It’s much improved over the one they’ve been limping away with for the past serveral years. The new site ads a full-screen video background of their commercials, and brings everything into a much more consistent package. The content hasn’t changed that much from previous designs, with the exception of updated media from their new TV campaigns. They did remove the Mentos store though. This had probably been planned for a while, since I’d noticed the store has been selling less and less merchandise. I’ll still miss it, since it was one constant place you could order some of the rare flavors not normally available in the US. Doubly sad is that I never got around to buying that Mentos wristwatch that they sold… oh well. Minus the loss of the store, I think the new site is a definite improvement.

Some new Mentos arrived in my mailbox the other day from my aunt and uncle (they’re now Mentos Ambassadors BTW). They send a couple 4-packs from France. One was a flavor I’ve had before, Soft Fruit (fruits rouges). The other was a new flavor I’ve not seen before, Fresh Cola. I’m always excited to get rare Mentos, but am especially excited when they are flavors I’ve never seen before. After a few photos, I opened up the fresh cola package and gave it a  try. The color of these candies is definitely brown (even though the photos make it look a bit orange). It’s a color of Mentos I’ve not ever seen. They are an interesting flavor to say the least. I don’t think I’d say it tastes like Coke or Pepsi, or even RC Cola. It tastes like… artificial cola flavor, like they tried really hard to make it taste like cola, but keep it sweet. I think cola is one of those awkward flavors that is hard to duplicate outside of the actual (liquid) thing. It is a sweet flavor, but also a bit tangy. I’m not sure if the tanginess is to try and mimic fizz, but it definitely isn’t a smooth flavor like the mint variations. There is virtually no aftertaste. These remind me a lot of the gummi cola bottles I had as a kid. There must be only one flavor our there for cola candy. Fresh Cola Mentos fits into the same category as the licorice flavored variety. They are definitely an acquired taste (which is probably why they aren’t sold in the US). So they at the bottom of the Mentos scale, but even the very last player on the Mentos scale is still head and tails above all other candy… c’mon they’re Mentos, the candy of the gods!

Ever wonder what would happen if you tried the infamous Diet Coke and Mentos experiment in Zero G? Robert Woodhead decided to take that experiment to the skies… literally. He packed up an experiment kit (Mentos, Diet Coke, containment bag) and took off in a special ZeroG plane to get weightless.

the hypothesis that we wanted to test was that convection of the soda was an important part of the whole reaction; under normal gravity, bubbles formed around the mentos rise up through the soda, allowing more soda to come in contact with the candy, and thus more bubbles form. However, in microgravity, there’s no “up”, so any bubbles that form will just stay near the mento, and will in fact keep new cola from reaching it.

What is a little bit like Mortal Kombat but involves mentos and kissing instead of fighting? If you said Mentos Kissfight, you guessed correctly! Mentos seems to be really pushing the kissability after eating their candies lately. Given their Kiss Cam web game, and the latest TV commercial for Mentos gum. The Kissfight game involves running around and trying to kiss your opponent (is that the best term here?) faster than they can kiss you. Picking up falling Mentos gives you super kiss powers. Give it a try, and see if you can become a Kissfight champion!

Turiba University Sets a new world record with 1911 simultaneous Diet Coke and Mentos fountains. This breaks the previous record set by 1360 Belgium students last April.

There seems to be a lot of Mentos news today! I just ran across a site called Mentos KissCam (I’m guessing from Europe) where you can (if you have a webcam) kiss a guy or gal after popping a Mentos Pure Fresh (a flavor not available in the US). Turn on your web cam and give it a try. (Maybe NSFW?)

“The freshest experience of your life”

“The film that is on everyone’s lips”