Tag Archives: fizzies

Mar 02

Fizzies update

Posted on by

FizziesWell, I posted a couple of weeks ago about Fizzies, an updated version of an effervescent fruit drink that was all the rage during my childhood. (One correction to that earlier post — I said that the last revival of Fizzies was five years ago; it was actually longer than that, with the company stopping production about 2000 or 2001.)

The latest company to produce the product does not sell retail quantities on-line, but they do refer you to retailers or online merchants. A friend of mine who runs a gift shop in Monteagle is looking at carrying the product, and I’ll certainly buy some from her if she does, but I couldn’t wait and ended up ordering some from Old Time Candy. This company, which I’d seen profiled on Food Network in the past, is a mail order house specializing in candy with nostalgia appeal — candies which might have been all the rage when you were a child, and which are still in production somewhere, but which are hard to find wherever you are these days. They can put together nostalgia-related gift packs and party favor bags, and have appropriate nostalgia booklets for various decades.

It’s a fun site just to noodle around — I had completely forgotten about Zotz, for example.

Feb 17

Fizzies

Posted on by

I’ve been taking Airborne (at least, a Wal-Mart generic version of Airborne) this weekend, and it got me to thinking about Fizzies. When I was growing up, Fizzies were a special treat — a carbonated drink that worked like Alka-Seltzer, with little fizzy tablets that dissolved in a glass of water. It was probably the first artificially-sweetened drink I ever had, though I didn’t know it at the time. A sugar-sweetened version would have needed tablets the diameter of golf balls and wouldn’t have dissolved as easily.

In fact, it was the artificial sweetner — something called cyclamate — which caused the demise of the original Fizzies. It was taken off the market, and so were Fizzies.

About five years ago or so, some investors brought Fizzies back, in a new formula, as a mail order product. I ordered it, and it was a wonderful little bit of nostalgia. But the revival was short-lived, and the new company ceased production.

When I was drinking my fizzy Airborne-like supplement this weekend, I decided I would try the old Fizzies URL just for the heck of it. Sure enough, there’s been yet another revival. The manufacturers are selling only by the case, but there’s a store locator at the site. I also ran across a candy-nostalgia web site where you can order the new product. I don’t know if the people putting the product out now are the same ones who were putting it out five years ago — they ignore the revival five years ago and make it sound like this is the first time the product has been available since the Good Old Days.