Today, I take issue with how LifeSavers has come up with its current five flavor assortment.
This is Disgrace Distract and Bother Me, a feature where I just point out minor things that annoy me in pop culture. Basically, think of it like the lowest level of criticism, then Remember to Forget is the middle, where it’s like, “Okay, this is bad, but not, like, offensively bad” and finally, Things That Turned Out Bad is for, “This is seriously messed up.”
As you all know by now, the one thing that companies seemingly CAN’T do is to stop messing with a good thing. For roughly seventy years, LifeSavers’s classic five flavors assortment remained the same five flavors – Cherry (the most popular), Orange, Lemon, Lime, and Pineapple.
Well, in 1999, LifeSavers figured it would try to mix things up, and get the public involved. Market research had led the company to understand that its least popular flavor of the five flavors was Pineapple, so Lifesavers did a Y2K-themed ad campaign where it was revealed that Pineapple was not “Y2K Compliant,” and thus fans had to get involved. They either had to vote for a new flavor to replace Pineapple (either Strawberry or Watermelon), or they had to vote for LifeSavers to keep Pineapple, and just make it Y2K-compliant.
The company was shocked by the overwhelming response…the fans didn’t want the company to mess with the flavor assortment, so Pineapple was here to stay. I remembered when it went down, I was pleased that the public told the company, “No, don’t do this,” and they actually didn’t do it. I think they had some ad campaign about Pineapple staying.
Okay, all good, right? Well, nooooooooooo.
Since four years later, LifeSavers just said, “Fuck it,” and now ALL FIVE FLAVORS WERE AT RISK!
Fans now had to vote for which five flavors they wanted, with the top five votegetters becoming the new Five Flavors. Cherry was a cinch, of course, and now that the fans were invested in Pineapple, the previously least-liked flavor now got a nod, but THE OTHER THREE FLAVORS WERE ALL DROPPED! Gone were Orange, Lemon, and Lime, replaced by Blackberry, Raspberry, and Watermelon.
To make things worse (well, okay, they made things better, but you know what I mean, it just expressed how little the voting process actually mattered), the company quietly brought Orange back in 2007 to replace Blackberry, and Raspberry simply became “Black Raspberry” to keep the color variety. Watermelon is also green for the same purpose.
So for 18 years now, the Five Flavors have been Cherry, Orange, Pineapple, Raspberry, and Watermelon.
Just do a freakin’ “Classic Five Flavors” special run, LifeSavers! How can there NOT be a market for that?
