May 2, 2024 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, PEZ had great success where it was invented, but changed its course after initially failing in America. Shawn Peterson, author of “PEZ: From Austrian Invention to American Icon”, shares the story of how this manual candy dispenser came to be.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. As you know, we're a
nation of immigrants, but it's not just people that travel,
it's also their ideas. One of these ideas is something
that many of us loved as kids. Sean Peterson of
(00:33):
the Pez Visitor Center is author of PEZ from Austrian
Invention to American Icon, and he's here to share how
it evolved into the brick shaped candy dispenser that we
all know and love today. Here's Sean.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Pez. The brand or the candy was invented by a
man named Edward has the Third. He was an Austrian.
The family had been very successful and a variety of
businesses up to that point, and they had a nice
business providing baking products. And one of the things mister
Haas noticed where people were having a difficult time digesting
(01:14):
some of the cakes based on some of the ingredients
that were in them, and found that peppermint oil was
a good way to help in the digestion. And a
byproduct of that, you know, it was a way to
freshen your breath, and most of all, he really wanted
to provide an alternative to smoking. He was very much
a man ahead of his time and didn't really think
(01:34):
too much of smoking and the health ramifications of that.
So his goal was to kind of come up with
an alternative to that, and he found peppermint oil and
through this what's called a cold press method where you
just kind of pressed the ingredients together, came up with
these little Pez tablets as the product and wanted to
(01:55):
see if there was interest. The German word for peppermint
is pefermints, and it's actually quite a long word, so
he used the first, middle and last letter of the
word feffermints, which was a pe in z, and he
found it was an easily pronounceable word in just about
any language, and it was a trademarkable brand name. So
(02:17):
it served two purposes in one and that that's really
how Pez got its start. For the first twenty plus
years of its creation, there was no dispenser. You either
bought the product in a little foil role similar to
what is offered today, or there was a little metal
tin that you could carry him in your pocket. If
(02:38):
you're old enough to remember. You know, you could get
like Bayer aspirin and a little metal tin probably associated
these days with like an altoid or something like that,
that you could carry in your pocket, and that was
really the only way you could get pez for its
initial creation. It wasn't til the late nineteen forties that
his success was growing in business was in preasing that
(03:01):
he wanted to try something different with that because he
was a bit of a germophobe. You know, I've got
this great candy. I'm the founder and inventor of this,
but if I want to offer it to you, you've
got to put your fingers in that ten to get
a piece of candy. And it's not really what I want.
So he found a freelance designer, a man named Oscar Usha,
(03:22):
and commissioned him to come up with some kind of
dispensing device for the candy. You know. He put a
little thumb grip at the top and some spring mechanisms
inside to be able to offer them one at a time,
and that's really how the shape of the dispenser was born.
Mister Haas started selling these in nineteen twenty seven in Austria,
(03:44):
found success rather quickly and expanded the product throughout Europe
and other parts of the world, and for him, the
last great market to conquer was the United States. So
nineteen fifty two it came to Lower Manhattan. They had
offices in New York City. They imported all of the
(04:06):
products from Europe and tried to sell them as they
had throughout the rest of the world, as an upscale
adult product and marketed as an alternative to smoking. And
it really didn't have the success that it had in Europe. Fact,
it really did poorly unfortunately. Well i'd say unfortunately, but
actually it was probably one of the best things that
(04:27):
could have happened to it. It was the lack of
success really that drove Pez to innovate and create the
changes that have made us successful to this day. They
were selling the dispenser without a character head. It just
had a little thumb grip and the only flavor you
could get was peppermint, and as I said, it didn't
(04:49):
really have the success that they had hoped for. So
somebody in marketing said, let's don't pull out of the market.
Let's think about what we're doing and how we could
do it differently, and they came up with the idea
of putting a three dimensional character head on top of
that dispenser, and children generally don't like peppermint, you know,
(05:09):
the strong flavors like that. So the idea was, let's
add fruit flavors to the candy, put the three dimensional
cartoon character head on top, and let's shift the marketing
from adults to children. And it changed really the direction
of the brand. They found success very quickly, and you know,
it changed the business model here in the United States
(05:32):
as well as globally, and we've been primarily a children's
product ever since the Pez Girl was a It was
kind of the grassroots marketing campaign of how they wanted
to advertise Pez. You know, this is something that nobody
was really familiar with. So they had these outfits for
(05:52):
ladies to wear. They would hire models to go out
and share the brand, and a lot of the early
ones had like skirts with big pockets so they could
keep a lot of the refills in them. And they
would just go out to events and hand the candy
to people, get them to try this new brand and
hopefully get people enthused about what this new product was.
(06:13):
It was very pin up girl esque when it started
in the nineteen fifties, so a lot of the early
PEZ girls were kind of leggy, and this is when
the marketing was being directed towards adults, and certainly that
shifted into sixties and seventies as it shifted to children.
In the nineteen seventies, you can see what looks like
a superhero. They had, you know, like knee high boots
(06:35):
on the models. She had a cape and instead of
the full PEZ logo, it just had like a giant
pee on the chest. So it looked, you know, kind
of like a superhero. And it worked.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you're listening to Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor
Center and telling a story we tell again and again
here on the show. That a failure, and that's the
failure to launch the PEZ product that had worked internationally
here in the United States. And what did they do well?
They learned from the market, they adapted and actually took
PEZ to a place they'd never been before. Again, a
(07:07):
failure leads to a success when we come back. More
from Sean Peterson, author of PEZ from Austrian Invention to
American Icon. Here on our American Stories, folks, if you
love the stories we tell about this great country and
especially the stories of America's rich past. Know that all
(07:27):
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we returned to our American stories
(08:11):
and to Sean Peterson with a story of Pez the
Manual candy Dispenser.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The first traditional head on a stem that you're familiar
with today was a witch for Halloween, and that was
nineteen fifty seven. And then the first licensed character was
nineteen fifty eight, and that was Popeye. And then we
followed that with a couple of additions to the seasonal line.
We added Santa for the first time. We've been doing
(08:38):
Santa ever since. It's coincidentally one of our best selling
probably our number one seller to this day. We added
an Easter line with the Easter Bunny that year, and
then about nineteen fifty nine nineteen sixty Casper and Bozo
came into the mix, and then nineteen sixty one we
did Mickey Mouse with Disney for the first time. And
(09:01):
I think we're actually the second longest licensed partner with Disney,
next to Donald Duck Orange Juice. We've been working with
Disney consecutive atly since nineteen sixty one, so we've probably
produced more Disney characters over the year than any other license.
You know, how many are there referring to the dispensers,
and this is what collectors like to talk about and argue.
(09:23):
You know, I mentioned Santa Claus. We've done many, many
iterations of Santa Claus and is it a variation or
is it a different dispenser? And you know, there's really
no right or wrong answer. So if we had to
go with just different character heads on top of the
dispenser base, somewhere in the fourteen hundred ish number range
(09:43):
right now. But if you start factoring in variations and
you know there's really no right or wrong answer as
to what constitutes a variation, start adding zeros to that
and it easily goes into thousands upon thousands. Right now,
we have fifteen different flav that we offer. The six
core Fruit flavors, and that's cherry, grape, lemon, strawberry, orange, raspberry,
(10:07):
you know, the things that you're familiar with. We do
four sour flavors, and then we do some seasonal flavors,
candy corn for Halloween, we do cotton candy. We just
introduced a new dragon fruit flavor to go with our
Game of Thrones gift set that we introduced, and then
we do sugar cookie for Christmas and vanilla cupcake for Easter.
(10:28):
So that gives us fifteen current flavors that we offer,
but we rotate things in and out. Every few years.
We try to introduce something new, and to do that
we usually retire a different flavor to try to keep
it fresh and different. There's been many, many dozens of
different flavors offered throughout the year. We just retired cola
and chocolate. We made those for probably a couple of
(10:51):
decades and finally decided it was time to retire and
try something different. We produce here at the factory about
twelve million individual candy tablets per day. There's certainly some
top collectors out there that have some incredible collections. There's
people it's really surprising, you know, they'll go in and
(11:15):
do buyouts of other collectors, and it's things they already have,
and they've got like many warehouses in their basement, you know,
and they may have five thousand of the same dispenser,
but that's part of the enjoyment for them. They like
just having the quantity of it. And then there's other
people that focus on not having duplicates, but they want
(11:36):
something different, and they have thousands upon thousands, you know,
in their collections. So it's really up to how you
want to enjoy and collect. It's what makes the hobby
so much fun is you know, everybody's got their own
take on it, but there's certainly some really impressive collections
out there when you look at what people have been
able to put together. The factor he's been here since
(11:58):
nineteen seventy three. This is the site that they chose
when they first decided to manufacture. They ended up moving
the offices from New York City to here in Connecticut
in the early seventies and we've been manufacturing in this
facility ever since. And then the visitor center came to be.
I think the original idea was around two thousand and six,
(12:22):
and it actually came from me. I approached the company.
They were familiar with me through some of the books
that I had published about the history of Pez and
documented all the various dispensers and things like that, and
they were using the books. People would come into marketing
and they would share my book with them, and you know, look,
(12:42):
you can get some ideas from this and see what
we've done. And when I approached, they kind of knew
who I was at that time and met with the
CEO of the company and I said, I know, you
guys haven't done this before, but I think it'd be
a great idea if you had some kind of historical
museum aspect the business, and you know, maybe a retail
piece attached to that that people could come in and
(13:04):
get a sense of the Pez history and how it's
changed and evolved, and have an opportunity to sell them
all things Pez right right there at the same facility.
And if you like the idea, I'd like to be
the guy to put that together and run it for you.
He said, we're just not ready for that step yet,
but let's stay in touch. So I took every opportunity
(13:26):
that I could for the next few years to, you know,
remind him that I'm still around and had interest in
doing this, and it was about late two thousand and
nine he called and said, you know, if you're still interested,
let's talk about doing this. I'm actually from Kansas City,
So not only did I have to move a household,
I had to move an entire collection halfway across the country.
(13:48):
And we figured out how to do that and got
me here to Connecticut and began the process of constructing
the visitors center. So while we were doing that, we
got a general contractor and started figuring out who can
supply giant PEZ dispensers and PEZ related fixtures and all
the cool stuff that we have here in the visitor center.
(14:10):
We started that process, and then I began work on
the website Pez dot com and figuring out how to
get the online store aspect together. That all took about
a year and a half, and in the meantime, the
visitor centers being constructed, and then we finally got it
open December of two thousand and eleven. To me coming
(14:30):
into work every day, you know, I see this every
single day, and I still find myself stopping and looking
around and just kind of enjoying the space. And I'm
the one that you know, kind of put the stuff
on the walls and put everything in the display cases.
But I still enjoy it, you know, ten years later,
it's still so much fun for me to have not
only a place for my collection, but being able to
(14:52):
share it with everybody now that comes in to see us,
the majority of business that we have, and people that
come through the door, you know, to this day, ten
years later, I think that's the thing that surprises me most. It's,
you know, people that had no idea they were going
to be here today and they just saw the signs
along the highway and it's the Pez Factory and we
(15:12):
know what that is, but let's go. We've never been
and they come in and the positive comments and feedback
that we hear from people, it's just like, you know,
it's amazing. We had no idea there was this much
to Pez, and to me, that's exciting and really one
of the goals behind this for me was just to
share it with people. It's been a big part of
my life. I've been doing this for over thirty years
(15:33):
and I's still really enthusiastic about it. It's exciting. There's
still things that you know are yet to be discovered
and you know, being able to share that with people
and hopefully create that spark of interest that maybe wants
to get them involved to where that maybe they're going
to start their own collection themselves, or you know, maybe
they think about Pez a little bit differently the next
(15:54):
time they see it in the store and they've been
to the factory and they watched where it was being
packaged and saw how we make the candy. It kind
of gives you a different appreciation for the brand and
what we do, so that that's really the most exciting
thing for me. And it was just kind of a
happy mistake trying to adapt to the market. And you know,
had they not done that, nobody would have probably heard
about Pez. It would just been a footnote in history
(16:16):
of a mint or an alternative to smoking, like many
products that have come and gone. It certainly wasn't intentional
or the original idea of it, but you know, it
was being able to adapt and just find the right market.
It changed and created a sense of Pez being part
of pop culture ever since. You know, it's a relatable
brand that everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And a special thanks to Madison for bringing us this
terrific story and a special thanks to Sean Peterson of
the PEZ Visitor Center, and by all means pick up
his book PEZ from Austrian Invention to American Icon in
Amazon or the usual Suspects. And if you're in the
Connecticut area and that's Orange, visit the PEZ Visitor Center.
(16:59):
Better still, if you can't get there, go to Pez
dot com and take a virtual tour. And by the way,
since the partnership with Disney and Mickey, there have been
many other partnerships with brands and with characters. And you
can find the Muppets, Sesame Street characters, the Marvel characters,
Star Wars characters, the Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo, Looney Tunes, Mario,
(17:21):
the Ninja, Turtles, the Simpsons, Pokemon and Angry Birds. The
story of Pez here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including yours. Send them to our American Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. As you know, we're a
nation of immigrants, but it's not just people that travel,
it's also their ideas. One of these ideas is something
that many of us loved as kids. Sean Peterson of
(00:33):
the Pez Visitor Center is author of PEZ from Austrian
Invention to American Icon, and he's here to share how
it evolved into the brick shaped candy dispenser that we
all know and love today. Here's Sean.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Pez. The brand or the candy was invented by a
man named Edward has the Third. He was an Austrian.
The family had been very successful and a variety of
businesses up to that point, and they had a nice
business providing baking products. And one of the things mister
Haas noticed where people were having a difficult time digesting
(01:14):
some of the cakes based on some of the ingredients
that were in them, and found that peppermint oil was
a good way to help in the digestion. And a
byproduct of that, you know, it was a way to
freshen your breath, and most of all, he really wanted
to provide an alternative to smoking. He was very much
a man ahead of his time and didn't really think
(01:34):
too much of smoking and the health ramifications of that.
So his goal was to kind of come up with
an alternative to that, and he found peppermint oil and
through this what's called a cold press method where you
just kind of pressed the ingredients together, came up with
these little Pez tablets as the product and wanted to
(01:55):
see if there was interest. The German word for peppermint
is pefermints, and it's actually quite a long word, so
he used the first, middle and last letter of the
word feffermints, which was a pe in z, and he
found it was an easily pronounceable word in just about
any language, and it was a trademarkable brand name. So
(02:17):
it served two purposes in one and that that's really
how Pez got its start. For the first twenty plus
years of its creation, there was no dispenser. You either
bought the product in a little foil role similar to
what is offered today, or there was a little metal
tin that you could carry him in your pocket. If
(02:38):
you're old enough to remember. You know, you could get
like Bayer aspirin and a little metal tin probably associated
these days with like an altoid or something like that,
that you could carry in your pocket, and that was
really the only way you could get pez for its
initial creation. It wasn't til the late nineteen forties that
his success was growing in business was in preasing that
(03:01):
he wanted to try something different with that because he
was a bit of a germophobe. You know, I've got
this great candy. I'm the founder and inventor of this,
but if I want to offer it to you, you've
got to put your fingers in that ten to get
a piece of candy. And it's not really what I want.
So he found a freelance designer, a man named Oscar Usha,
(03:22):
and commissioned him to come up with some kind of
dispensing device for the candy. You know. He put a
little thumb grip at the top and some spring mechanisms
inside to be able to offer them one at a time,
and that's really how the shape of the dispenser was born.
Mister Haas started selling these in nineteen twenty seven in Austria,
(03:44):
found success rather quickly and expanded the product throughout Europe
and other parts of the world, and for him, the
last great market to conquer was the United States. So
nineteen fifty two it came to Lower Manhattan. They had
offices in New York City. They imported all of the
(04:06):
products from Europe and tried to sell them as they
had throughout the rest of the world, as an upscale
adult product and marketed as an alternative to smoking. And
it really didn't have the success that it had in Europe. Fact,
it really did poorly unfortunately. Well i'd say unfortunately, but
actually it was probably one of the best things that
(04:27):
could have happened to it. It was the lack of
success really that drove Pez to innovate and create the
changes that have made us successful to this day. They
were selling the dispenser without a character head. It just
had a little thumb grip and the only flavor you
could get was peppermint, and as I said, it didn't
(04:49):
really have the success that they had hoped for. So
somebody in marketing said, let's don't pull out of the market.
Let's think about what we're doing and how we could
do it differently, and they came up with the idea
of putting a three dimensional character head on top of
that dispenser, and children generally don't like peppermint, you know,
(05:09):
the strong flavors like that. So the idea was, let's
add fruit flavors to the candy, put the three dimensional
cartoon character head on top, and let's shift the marketing
from adults to children. And it changed really the direction
of the brand. They found success very quickly, and you know,
it changed the business model here in the United States
(05:32):
as well as globally, and we've been primarily a children's
product ever since the Pez Girl was a It was
kind of the grassroots marketing campaign of how they wanted
to advertise Pez. You know, this is something that nobody
was really familiar with. So they had these outfits for
(05:52):
ladies to wear. They would hire models to go out
and share the brand, and a lot of the early
ones had like skirts with big pockets so they could
keep a lot of the refills in them. And they
would just go out to events and hand the candy
to people, get them to try this new brand and
hopefully get people enthused about what this new product was.
(06:13):
It was very pin up girl esque when it started
in the nineteen fifties, so a lot of the early
PEZ girls were kind of leggy, and this is when
the marketing was being directed towards adults, and certainly that
shifted into sixties and seventies as it shifted to children.
In the nineteen seventies, you can see what looks like
a superhero. They had, you know, like knee high boots
(06:35):
on the models. She had a cape and instead of
the full PEZ logo, it just had like a giant
pee on the chest. So it looked, you know, kind
of like a superhero. And it worked.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And you're listening to Sean Peterson of the Pez Visitor
Center and telling a story we tell again and again
here on the show. That a failure, and that's the
failure to launch the PEZ product that had worked internationally
here in the United States. And what did they do well?
They learned from the market, they adapted and actually took
PEZ to a place they'd never been before. Again, a
(07:07):
failure leads to a success when we come back. More
from Sean Peterson, author of PEZ from Austrian Invention to
American Icon. Here on our American Stories, folks, if you
love the stories we tell about this great country and
especially the stories of America's rich past. Know that all
(07:27):
of our stories about American history, from war to innovation,
culture and faith are brought to us by the great
folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all
the things that are beautiful in life and all the
things that are good in life. And if you can't
get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their
free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to learn more. And we returned to our American stories
(08:11):
and to Sean Peterson with a story of Pez the
Manual candy Dispenser.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The first traditional head on a stem that you're familiar
with today was a witch for Halloween, and that was
nineteen fifty seven. And then the first licensed character was
nineteen fifty eight, and that was Popeye. And then we
followed that with a couple of additions to the seasonal line.
We added Santa for the first time. We've been doing
(08:38):
Santa ever since. It's coincidentally one of our best selling
probably our number one seller to this day. We added
an Easter line with the Easter Bunny that year, and
then about nineteen fifty nine nineteen sixty Casper and Bozo
came into the mix, and then nineteen sixty one we
did Mickey Mouse with Disney for the first time. And
(09:01):
I think we're actually the second longest licensed partner with Disney,
next to Donald Duck Orange Juice. We've been working with
Disney consecutive atly since nineteen sixty one, so we've probably
produced more Disney characters over the year than any other license.
You know, how many are there referring to the dispensers,
and this is what collectors like to talk about and argue.
(09:23):
You know, I mentioned Santa Claus. We've done many, many
iterations of Santa Claus and is it a variation or
is it a different dispenser? And you know, there's really
no right or wrong answer. So if we had to
go with just different character heads on top of the
dispenser base, somewhere in the fourteen hundred ish number range
(09:43):
right now. But if you start factoring in variations and
you know there's really no right or wrong answer as
to what constitutes a variation, start adding zeros to that
and it easily goes into thousands upon thousands. Right now,
we have fifteen different flav that we offer. The six
core Fruit flavors, and that's cherry, grape, lemon, strawberry, orange, raspberry,
(10:07):
you know, the things that you're familiar with. We do
four sour flavors, and then we do some seasonal flavors,
candy corn for Halloween, we do cotton candy. We just
introduced a new dragon fruit flavor to go with our
Game of Thrones gift set that we introduced, and then
we do sugar cookie for Christmas and vanilla cupcake for Easter.
(10:28):
So that gives us fifteen current flavors that we offer,
but we rotate things in and out. Every few years.
We try to introduce something new, and to do that
we usually retire a different flavor to try to keep
it fresh and different. There's been many, many dozens of
different flavors offered throughout the year. We just retired cola
and chocolate. We made those for probably a couple of
(10:51):
decades and finally decided it was time to retire and
try something different. We produce here at the factory about
twelve million individual candy tablets per day. There's certainly some
top collectors out there that have some incredible collections. There's
people it's really surprising, you know, they'll go in and
(11:15):
do buyouts of other collectors, and it's things they already have,
and they've got like many warehouses in their basement, you know,
and they may have five thousand of the same dispenser,
but that's part of the enjoyment for them. They like
just having the quantity of it. And then there's other
people that focus on not having duplicates, but they want
(11:36):
something different, and they have thousands upon thousands, you know,
in their collections. So it's really up to how you
want to enjoy and collect. It's what makes the hobby
so much fun is you know, everybody's got their own
take on it, but there's certainly some really impressive collections
out there when you look at what people have been
able to put together. The factor he's been here since
(11:58):
nineteen seventy three. This is the site that they chose
when they first decided to manufacture. They ended up moving
the offices from New York City to here in Connecticut
in the early seventies and we've been manufacturing in this
facility ever since. And then the visitor center came to be.
I think the original idea was around two thousand and six,
(12:22):
and it actually came from me. I approached the company.
They were familiar with me through some of the books
that I had published about the history of Pez and
documented all the various dispensers and things like that, and
they were using the books. People would come into marketing
and they would share my book with them, and you know, look,
(12:42):
you can get some ideas from this and see what
we've done. And when I approached, they kind of knew
who I was at that time and met with the
CEO of the company and I said, I know, you
guys haven't done this before, but I think it'd be
a great idea if you had some kind of historical
museum aspect the business, and you know, maybe a retail
piece attached to that that people could come in and
(13:04):
get a sense of the Pez history and how it's
changed and evolved, and have an opportunity to sell them
all things Pez right right there at the same facility.
And if you like the idea, I'd like to be
the guy to put that together and run it for you.
He said, we're just not ready for that step yet,
but let's stay in touch. So I took every opportunity
(13:26):
that I could for the next few years to, you know,
remind him that I'm still around and had interest in
doing this, and it was about late two thousand and
nine he called and said, you know, if you're still interested,
let's talk about doing this. I'm actually from Kansas City,
So not only did I have to move a household,
I had to move an entire collection halfway across the country.
(13:48):
And we figured out how to do that and got
me here to Connecticut and began the process of constructing
the visitors center. So while we were doing that, we
got a general contractor and started figuring out who can
supply giant PEZ dispensers and PEZ related fixtures and all
the cool stuff that we have here in the visitor center.
(14:10):
We started that process, and then I began work on
the website Pez dot com and figuring out how to
get the online store aspect together. That all took about
a year and a half, and in the meantime, the
visitor centers being constructed, and then we finally got it
open December of two thousand and eleven. To me coming
(14:30):
into work every day, you know, I see this every
single day, and I still find myself stopping and looking
around and just kind of enjoying the space. And I'm
the one that you know, kind of put the stuff
on the walls and put everything in the display cases.
But I still enjoy it, you know, ten years later,
it's still so much fun for me to have not
only a place for my collection, but being able to
(14:52):
share it with everybody now that comes in to see us,
the majority of business that we have, and people that
come through the door, you know, to this day, ten
years later, I think that's the thing that surprises me most. It's,
you know, people that had no idea they were going
to be here today and they just saw the signs
along the highway and it's the Pez Factory and we
(15:12):
know what that is, but let's go. We've never been
and they come in and the positive comments and feedback
that we hear from people, it's just like, you know,
it's amazing. We had no idea there was this much
to Pez, and to me, that's exciting and really one
of the goals behind this for me was just to
share it with people. It's been a big part of
my life. I've been doing this for over thirty years
(15:33):
and I's still really enthusiastic about it. It's exciting. There's
still things that you know are yet to be discovered
and you know, being able to share that with people
and hopefully create that spark of interest that maybe wants
to get them involved to where that maybe they're going
to start their own collection themselves, or you know, maybe
they think about Pez a little bit differently the next
(15:54):
time they see it in the store and they've been
to the factory and they watched where it was being
packaged and saw how we make the candy. It kind
of gives you a different appreciation for the brand and
what we do, so that that's really the most exciting
thing for me. And it was just kind of a
happy mistake trying to adapt to the market. And you know,
had they not done that, nobody would have probably heard
about Pez. It would just been a footnote in history
(16:16):
of a mint or an alternative to smoking, like many
products that have come and gone. It certainly wasn't intentional
or the original idea of it, but you know, it
was being able to adapt and just find the right market.
It changed and created a sense of Pez being part
of pop culture ever since. You know, it's a relatable
brand that everybody knows.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And a special thanks to Madison for bringing us this
terrific story and a special thanks to Sean Peterson of
the PEZ Visitor Center, and by all means pick up
his book PEZ from Austrian Invention to American Icon in
Amazon or the usual Suspects. And if you're in the
Connecticut area and that's Orange, visit the PEZ Visitor Center.
(16:59):
Better still, if you can't get there, go to Pez
dot com and take a virtual tour. And by the way,
since the partnership with Disney and Mickey, there have been
many other partnerships with brands and with characters. And you
can find the Muppets, Sesame Street characters, the Marvel characters,
Star Wars characters, the Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo, Looney Tunes, Mario,
(17:21):
the Ninja, Turtles, the Simpsons, Pokemon and Angry Birds. The
story of Pez here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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