Dum Dums' Mystery Flavor Is Always Changing, Here's The Clever Reason

Good news for anyone with an adventurous sweet tooth: The Dum Dums lollipop mystery flavor will always remain, well, a mystery. The teeny tiny lollipops offered in doctors' offices and small businesses across the country come in flavors ranging from tropical fruits to sodas to nostalgic desserts. Since 2001, Dum Dums variety packs have included the bonus mystery flavor. Each time you unwrap a mystery-flavored Dum Dum, you'll be in for a surprise, because the mystery flavor is always changing. 

That's because the Dum Dums mystery flavor is created when one batch of lollipops ends and the next one begins, creating a fusion of two different flavors. Rather than taking the time to stop production and clean the machines between flavors, workers can quickly throw in a new flavor on top of what's left of the previous one and package it in a purple mystery wrapper. There are so many possibilities: hot chocolate strawberry milkshake, caramel apple birthday cake, butterscotch cotton candy, and so on. There's no telling what combination you could unwrap, but Reddit users have posted evidence of these flavor mashups by showing two-toned lollipops with two distinct flavors inside.

Spangler Candy, the makers of Dum Dums, is not the first candy company to pull this trick. In 1993, Airheads released its white mystery flavor, which is created in the same way. It's an efficient strategy to churn out candy without having to delay production.

Flavor mixing isn't the only method of making mystery flavors. A Spangler Candy spokesperson, Diana Moore Eschhofen, told Today in 2017, "It still happens, but not always. Sometimes it's a different thing now." The Dum Dums website is equally vague: "We can only reveal that the mystery flavor continuously changes and is not limited to current Dum Dums flavors." 

That means you may get a seasonal flavor or even a throwback flavor. In 2015, Spangler switched things up and sold a Mystery Mania bag featuring bacon-, buttered popcorn-, and pizza-flavored pops. However, the mania didn't catch on enough to have the enduring legacy that Jelly Belly's BeanBoozled mystery bean dispenser has.

Still, the mystery-flavored Dum Dum has its fans. The now-shuttered Pariah Brewing Company, which had locations in San Diego, California, and Baltimore, Maryland, sold a Dum Dum mystery flavor-inspired beer made with raspberry, strawberry, and dried lemon. In the subreddit r/candy, users share their mystery pops, asking for the Internet's help in determining just what the flavor might be. If Forrest Gump were born about sixty years later, his mom might have said, "Life is like a mystery flavor Dum Dum. You never know what you're going to get."