Self-evident: Necco wafers are awful.

Awful. Just awful.

Photo: Necco

When it comes to products, there must be a certain security in being terrible. Even if your product is so terrible that most people won’t come near it, that means that some people will love it, and those people will have a hard time finding such terrible options anywhere else, so they’ll be your customers for life. Sure, eventually they’ll die, but there’ll still be a tiny population of people who actually find your product appealing, so you’ll never totally go out of business. It seems like a comfortable place to be as a businessperson. So why would you mess with a good thing?

A little while ago, the world’s leading manufacturer of awful candy, the New England Candy Company, or Necco, decided to fiddle withthe recipe for its disgusting Necco wafers, switching to natural colors and flavors. Because apparently, artificial colors and flavors were keeping Necco from capturing the wider bad candy market.  How many of us have said to ourselves, “Well, I want a candy that tastes like slightly sweetened dried drywall mud, but darn it, I don’t want all those icky chemicals!” or “Why can’t I get a clove-flavored candy that makes communion wafers seem tasty, but colored purple with beet juice extract instead of red #6?” Because, you know, the purple Necco wafers are clove-flavored. Clove.

This didn’t go over well. Apparently, there are Necco wafer enthusiasts who actually eat this so-called candy, and don’t just buy them to give to teenage trick-or-treaters or shingle the roof of a gingerbread house. And they don’t just eat them: they like them! They like them so much that they assailed Necco with complaints until they got the original recipe reinstated. Even worse – they stopped buying them! Sales fell 35%. I guess Necco doesn’t sell enough of their other terrible candy – mary janes, conversation hearts – to be able to withstand that kind of blow, so back they went.  

 I never realized that people actually ate Necco wafers until I moved to New England. I thought that they were only useful for projects, like gingerbread houses, where the goal was to make everything edible, even if only technically. Necco wafers are the kind of candy that passed for candy before there was good candy. Like hoarhound candy and anything molasses-flavored: these are the candies of the beforetimes, before Milton Hershey was born. There is no longer a need for these candies. Necco wafers, ribbon candies that come in a can, pillow mints. They should be eliminated from our collective human consciousness. But at my local market they sell them right next to the tasty candy, and someone must be buying them, right? Just like someone must be drinking Moxie. (That is, outside of the stateof Maine, where they use it to tell the native Mainers from the outsiders.)

Read and laugh: check out this article that claims Necco wafers have health benefits, due to the beet juice and purple cabbage and turmeric and stuff. (Someone needs to tell Livestrong that they’re going back to non-nature.)