Was walking through a grocery store and noticed peeps, which I always just noticed as an Easter candy expanded to more flavors.
Most being pretty simple flavors.
Cotton candy
Coffee flavor
Birthday cake
Chocolate coffee
Was a little thrown off when I saw hot tamale flavored peeps and decided to look a little more about spicy candies as a product category.
Found pretty much every candy brand has moved into having some form of spicy option.
Kit Kats
Jelly Belly
Jolly Ranchers
And looking at the website Candy Warehouse, 155 spicy candies are currently sold, being one of their biggest categories.
I also began looking at the history of the popular candy Red Hots, made by Ferrara Candy’s.
Ferrara started in 1908 and Red Hots were actually their second mass sold candy that started in the 1930s, with the first being Jujyfruits.
The candy despite being almost a hundred years old and having almost no recipe/packaging changed still sells well, where the company reports they sell over 40 million dollars in them yearly.
Which makes an interesting question on why other competitors in the spicy candy market didn’t pop up sooner, instead of this recent trend.
Quick check on that and found in 2017 alone, over 22,000 food/candy products were introduced in the US under the packaging of being spicy. Up from 18,000 in 2016 and in 2007, it was under 10,000.
Which also brings in the final reason, which is just shelf space.
For a brand like Peeps, there’s clearly some market for spicier candies/snacks, but it also gets them an easy way to add shelf space without competing with itself.
Cotton candy
Coffee
Cake
Chocolate
Only so many more flavors can help until there are ten products competing with themselves.
All said and done, it’s a really weird thing, but spicy does sell well, so in a strange way it makes sense to do spicy peeps as a thing.