The surprising history of an iconic American candy
Since 1955, American children have nearly decapitated favorite pop culture characters — from Popeye and mickey mouse to Princesses leia and elsa — to release a chalky sugar brick from the neck of a Pez dispenser. for the past five decades, the Pez factory in orange, Conn., has produced the little rectangular candies for all of America and Canada. each week, 100,000 pounds of sugar become 60 million candies. A massive press exerts 3,000 pounds of pressure to compress the mix of sugar, corn syrup, and flavoring into the signature Pez brick.
Three decades before American children tasted their first Pez, the candy was invented in Vienna, Austria, by eduard Haas iii. it was 1927, and Haas, an antismoking advocate, was looking to create a healthier alternative to cigarettes. the first Pez candies — the acronym was pulled from the first, middle, and last letters of the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminz — were made with peppermint oil and came wrapped in foil or packaged in metal tins. An early slogan was “Rauchen verboten, Pez-en erlaubt!” — “smoking prohibited, Pezing allowed!” young women in Pez-bedazzled trousers handed out samples of the candies on busy european street corners.
In 1949, a pocket-sized dispenser for the candies debuted at the Vienna trade fair. the new design — which was headless and is what collectors today call a “regular” — caused a sensation. Whether intentional or not, it bore an unmistakable resemblance to a lighter. Pez racked up millions in sales across europe.
Americans were less excited about this european import. When Pez opened offices in new york in 1952, us sales were lackluster, says shawn Peterson, one of the world’s most avid and knowledgeable Pez collectors and the author of “Pez: from Austrian invention to American icon.” “Americans didn’t want an alternative to smoking,” he says. “And i guess they really didn’t care what their breath was like.”
So Pez usA decided to pivot to the world’s most reliable candy enthusiasts: children. the company ditched peppermint for fruit flavors and redesigned the dispensers as kid-friendly characters. Pez founder Haas resisted. He was worried about cheapening his brand’s highend reputation. but sales were brisk, and the rest, as they say, is a pediatric dentist’s nightmare — i mean, is candy history.
The first toy-like Pez dispensers, santa Claus and Robot, were released in 1955. these full-body designs were hand-glued together, making them expensive to produce, and at 25 cents each, they cost more than five times as much as the average candy bar at the time. by 1957, Pez had scaled back the design, introducing the head-only dispenser we know today. the first featured an orange-headed witch on a midnight black stem, just in time for the patron saint of candy’s special day, Halloween.
next came Popeye, the first licensed character to adorn a dispenser. With the introduction of the spinachloving sailor, sales took off, leaving european sales in the dust.
Today, rare Pez dispensers can sell for hundreds, or thousands, of dollars. A pair of early 1960s Pez dispensers representing the Republican and democratic parties — elephant and donkey heads — sold for $25,000 a decade ago. Why the high price tag? the Kennedy mystique. the donkey dispenser, along with an appropriately elegant one in gold plate and another bearing the head of bozo the Clown, was created in 1961 as a gift for the first family — John f. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and their daughter Caroline. (A document at the JfK Presidential library indicates that the secret service instructed the Kennedys to return the gift, but it does not say why.)
Peterson has been scavenging for 5-cent Pez dispensers in flea markets since he was a kid in Kansas City. His first three quickly grew to 30, then 300, and now 5,000. His collection of dispensers and Pez-related merchandise may be the largest in the world. much of it is now housed at the Pez Visitor Center in orange, which was Peterson’s brainchild and the result of years of lobbying the company to build it.
He says he would come to Connecticut for collector conventions — there is a robust international community of collectors — and leave feeling disheartened that all the us headquarters had for enthusiasts was a windowless concrete warehouse. in one of his countless meetings at corporate headquarters to lobby for the visitor center, Peterson, who at the time worked for Hallmark in Kansas City, told the company’s then Ceo, “i would like to be the guy to run it for you.”
Peterson’s vision prevailed, and the Pez Visitor Center opened in 2011, with Peterson as its direct to consumer business manager. All but two of the objects on display are Peterson’s.
Every weekend, the visitor center swarms with families pulling off the i-95 highway that runs between boston and new york. some 80,000 visitors a year leave with a handful of Pez — Peppa Pig, spongebob, barbie. Perhaps these will become the first pieces in the collections of a new generation of sugar-obsessed children.