You Barely See Anyone Eat This Classic Candy At Movie Theaters Anymore
Besides the airport, the movie theater is one of the only places where, no, it's not strange that you just downed a whole pack of Twizzlers in five minutes and you're following it up with a noisy box of Junior Mints. You want Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at a 10 a.m. matinee? No problem. Cooke Dough Bites and M&M's mixed with a bag of popcorn for a midnight premiere? Sure thing. With all of the big-name candies we know and love taking center stage, some classics have fallen onto the back burner, like Bottle Caps.
It's not that Bottle Caps are necessarily a bad candy — In our ranking of 18 classic movie theater candies, we thought that Bottle Caps were fairly good — they're just nowhere near as popular or prevalent as they used to be. Bottle Caps are technically still in production, so yes, you might spot the 5-ounce boxes at your local movie theater or the rolled Bottle Caps at a drug store, but with more well-known candies like Hershey's and Buncha Crunch dominating the movie theater candy market, Bottle Caps have devolved into more of a nostalgic treat than a product with first dibs on shelf space.
Bottle Caps aren't discontinued, but they've definitely been dethroned
Created in 1972 by Breaker Confections, Bottle Caps were available in five soda-inspired flavors: root beer, cherry, cola, grape, and orange. At one point, when the candy was owned by Nestle's Willy Wonka Candy Company, Bottle Caps came with a lemon-lime flavor, but it didn't last long. There's still plenty of debate about which flavor was the best, though many would argue that it was root beer or cola (here's what gives root beer its unique flavor). The candy was meant to mimic its namesake not only in taste, but in shape and design too, crafted with the ridges and texture of an old-fashioned soda tab.
Eventually, the Ferrara Candy Company took over production of Bottle Caps until it too was acquired by the Ferrero Group in 2018. While some eagle-eyed fans claim that the size of the Bottle Caps in current boxes is smaller than they used to be, others say that the rolled tubes are original-sized. Despite the colorful history of this candy, Bottle Caps are right up there with those other soda-inspired candies (like the vintage Betty Crocker candy from the '90s) that we just don't see anymore.