Willy Wonka Candy Company, Everlasting Gobstoppers

Willy Wonka candies are one of the more confusing entrants on the candy scene.  Although we all associate Willy Wonka with the idea of the best candy in the world (and a lot of fun, and a certain dollop of grim tragedy besides) the candies produced under the name "Willy Wonka Candy Company" are in general pretty awful.

Take for example the Everlasting Gobstoppers.  In the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Everlasting Gobstoppers were literally everlasting.  Willy Wonka devised them for poor children, so that they could basically suck on the same piece of candy forever.  Kind of gross, okay, but even accounting for the hyperbole, there are some fine gobstoppers on the market today.  Most of these are sold singly, and will indeed threaten to break your teeth if you try to bite them.  

Everlasting Gobstoppers, on the other hand, are basically SweetTarts with a hard candy coating.  Small ones, too, because each Everlasting Gobstopper is roughly the size of a jellybean, albeit perfectly spherical.  They have a variety of colors on the outer coating, but if these colors coordinated to a flavor for the outer layer, I wasn't able to detect it.  The first (and middle and last) thing you taste in an Everlasting Gobstopper is "misc fruity sweetness."

I also kept having trouble with the little rascals rolling around on my desk and trying to escape.  I finally had to resort to pouring them into a small dish to keep them corralled.  I can think of only a few perfectly round candies, and these are all soft (like sour balls) which keeps them from rolling.  Everlasting Gobstoppers on the other hand are like setting a handful of ball bearings down on the table.  Candy lover beware.

The candy coating is not particularly hard nor thick, and pretty much begs to be bitten into.  When you do crunch down (as inevitably you will, despite your best intentions) you get a burst of weird artificial fruit flavor, then the powdery crunch of SweetTarts.  Underwhelming, to say the least.

In between the hard outer coating and the inner powdered stuff, I did detect a quick burst of fruity flavor.  It's hard to say if this flavor is tied to a layer of the candy center, or just a quick coating of flavor in between the layers, or what.  The flavor did vary from one Everlasting Gobstopper to the next, but I was never really able to tell which flavor it was.  Lemon?  Orange?  Grape?  They all kind of tasted the same - relentlessly sweet, and vaguely fruity.

The "Willy Wonka Candy Factory" name was licensed by an Illinois candy making company in the mid 1970s as a promotional tie-in with the movie (the real movie, with Gene Wilder).  It was later bought out by Nestle, who manufactures Willy Wonka candy to this day.  I have often wanted to peruse Nestle's internal documents relating to the Willy Wonka candy line, because I swear to you that all of the Willy Wonka candies taste exactly the same, and are made of the same components.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user elh70