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Our advertising agency Whitaker and Associates of Cincinnati Ohio took it from there. Then I took out my doodle pad and drew the name on a sheet with a balloon face. So I set up focus groups first to see what they thought of the name itself it rated very high with children nine through fifteen. What would you call your friend who did something silly? They came up with all kinds of monikers, but the most intriguing was Airhead. So I went to my sons and asked the question. I was taught at M&M/Mars that a name takes a little over a generation to become part of confectionary landscape, unless you use a phrase or name that everyone has heard before. Kim mixed the flavors and after two days we hit the flavor panel we wanted. Whatever the per capital sugar consumption rate was in the US at the time, the consumers at Wayne’s ate a lot of candy. What made Wayne’s so special was the fact that customers came there and bought bags of 240 count candy for their own home use. So with our Food Technologist Kim Meader and her mixer, we took a crew down to Memphis Tennessee and set up a sampling table at Wayne’s Cash and Carry. Fortunately, after much testing, we found a Mylar wrapper that worked perfectly. We had to find a wrapper that the product would not adhere to. The issue they had was that it was very sticky. They said they could extrude it in the form of a flat bar. The production people brought in a blob on a plate and said this is what we have. So, I asked the R&D folks to leave the rice paper off and bring the fruit center to a meeting so we could weigh our options. Now we had this machinery in the warehouse and what could we do with it. So they had Van Melle produce about 10,000 cases for limited sales and focus group testing.Īfter the dust settled, Lipton Tea informed us that The Fruit Wrinkles was preferred over the Fruit and Wafer Bars. The product winner of the testing would get a national launch and Lipton’s marketing muscle behind it. Lipton wanted to test the product against Fruit Wrinkles to see which would be more accepted by the public. After sometime we had refined the fruit and wafer bars to the point that we were ready to go into limited production. At the same time Lipton was also developing Fruit Wrinkles. So we set up a satellite production facility in Edgewood Kentucky in our warehouse. Lipton Tea liked it and agreed to terms calling it the fruit and wafer bar. They thought it had some real points of difference and they offered it to Lipton Tea as a new product possibility. It was a soft flat fruit chew placed in between two pieces of rice paper. Van Melle had a product that they were working on in Germany. The birth of Airheads was preceded by these events. Our main item was Mentos and the owners of Van Melle Headquartered in Breda Holland wanted us to expand our product portfolio.
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Unfortunately, I never benefited monetarily as I signed an agreement when I joined Van Melle in 1984 as the Director of Marketing that anything I developed while working at the company was owned by them. It has gone on to be one of the largest non-chocolate confectionary items in North America. I was responsible for the Graphic Design, Name, and Intellectual property known as “Airheads” for the company, at the time, known as Van Melle Incorporated located in Erlanger Kentucky. That was the day that I submitted my plans for the development of the product known as “AIRHEADS”. ~ As told by Steve Bruner, inventor of Airheads