Who invented POP ROCKS®?

“Carbonated Candy” was originally invented in 1956 by William A. Mitchell, a chemist at the General Foods company looking for a way to make instant carbonated soda (think Coke) by somehow trapping carbon dioxide into candy tablets. But when the instant soda experiment didn’t turn out, the formula was forgotten and put away. Twenty years later, another chemist came across the formula, reworked it a little, and turned it into POP ROCKS®.

Though POP ROCKS® had been thoroughly tested and found innocuous, the exploding candy still startled residents when it was first released. The FDA arranged a telephone hotline to assure anxious parents that the popping candy would not cause children to choke. Mixing the candy with carbonated drinks would cause the stomach to explode, was the popular buzz.

General Foods was battling “exploded kid” rumors as early as 1979, a mere four years after the product went to market. They took out full-page ads in 45 majors publications, wrote some 50,000 letters to school principals around the country, and sent the confection’s inventor on the road to explain to all that POP ROCKS® generate less gas than half a can of soda and ingesting them could induce nothing worse in the human body than a hearty, non-life-threatening belch. Despite all these measures, the rumors of the urban legend abound even to this day.

But rumors die hard. POP ROCKS® were briefly discontinued in the mid-1980’s.

Rising from the rumor-fanned flames just a few years later, today POP ROCKS® continues to be a national brand full of energy.