A bakery on the Western Scheldt and a train ride to Poland.

Mentos comes from a Dutch family confectioner, Van Melle, which began in Breskens, in Zeelandic Flanders. Sources date the business slightly differently. English Wikipedia gives 1840; the International Directory of Company Histories gives 1841, when, it says, Izaak van Melle opened a bakery in the town; and the company itself says that in 1900 a later Izaak van Melle converted a bakery “founded 60 years earlier” into a small confectionery business. The Directory adds that Abraham van Melle began making sweets in 1882 and that in 1900 the founder’s grandson Izaak took over and built a new factory for large-scale production. Dutch Wikipedia says that from 1900 the sugar sweets were made by machine, and that the firm made toffees from 1926.

The recipe that became Mentos came from abroad. The company says that in 1932 the brothers Michael and Pierre van Melle travelled to Poland and brought back methods for making soft chews, which became Fruittella and, later, Mentos; its British brand site says the idea of a peppermint-flavoured caramel to be called Mentos came to the brothers on a train ride there. The Directory places the trip in the early 1930s and says it produced two recipes, one of them a candy-coated peppermint caramel. English Wikipedia also dates the first Mentos to 1932, while Dutch Wikipedia’s article on the sweet says it was first made in the Netherlands in the 1950s, so the date of the first Mentos on sale is not settled.

The war ended production in Breskens. Dutch Wikipedia says the town was heavily bombed by the Allies on 11 September 1944 and the factory destroyed, and that production restarted in Rotterdam in 1946. The brand site says the first Mentos roll reached shoppers in 1960 and the first Mentos television commercial ran in 1976. In 1984, the company says, Van Melle moved from Rotterdam to Breda to gain production space; Dutch Wikipedia dates the move to 1982–1983, to the former Enka site, and says the firm employed about 2,300 people in the early 1990s.

The Freshmaker, and a fountain the company did not invent.

English Wikipedia describes Mentos as small, slightly flattened spheres with a hard outer layer and a soft, chewy inside, sold in rolls of 14. Outside Europe, the brand is best remembered for its advertising. The brand site says the “Freshmaker” campaign was introduced in 1990 and that sales “went through the roof” straight afterwards. English Wikipedia says the classic campaign began in late 1991 and ran on American and Canadian television into 2001. Mental Floss, in a 2017 history by Jake Rossen, reported that the American spots began in July 1992, were made by the Hamburg agency Pahnke & Partners, and wound down around 2002.

The same article quoted the director Jesse Peretz calling the commercials “total lobotomized happiness,” and listed the parodies and references they drew, among them the Foo Fighters’ 1996 video for “Big Me” and a mention in the film Clueless. The slogans have since moved on: English Wikipedia gives “Stay Fresh” from about 2013, and the brand site says Mentos was repositioned around “Yes to Fresh” in 2021.

The other thing many people know about Mentos is something the company did not invent. English Wikipedia says the chemistry teacher Lee Marek showed what happens when Mentos are dropped into Diet Coke on the Late Show with David Letterman on 14 September 1999, and that a June 2006 internet video by EepyBird made the fountain widely known. Wikipedia attributes the foaming to nucleation: the sweet’s rough surface gives dissolved carbon dioxide many places to form bubbles at once. The brand’s British site lists a 2007 Guinness World Record in Cincinnati, with 850 people setting off fountains at the same time; Wikipedia records larger attempts in Manila in 2010 and in León, Mexico, in 2014.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make mints, pastilles, throat sweets or chews, and they come from the Netherlands, Italy, Britain and Switzerland: Mentos, Tic Tac, Altoids, Polo, Fisherman’s Friend, Ricola and Fruittella. Sugar confectionery brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger confectionery groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a station kiosk to a supermarket checkout.

A sweet brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single sweet than by a pack, a name and the moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its sweets are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its sweets are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Italian-owned since 2001, still made in Breda.

Mentos has been Italian-owned since 2001. Its buyer, Perfetti, was founded in 1946 in Lainate, near Milan, by the brothers Ambrogio and Egidio Perfetti as Dolcificio Lombardo, and took the Perfetti name in 1970, the group says. Dutch Wikipedia says Perfetti had worked with Van Melle since 1979. The International Directory of Company Histories says Perfetti bought a 37 per cent stake in Van Melle in 1991 and, in 2001, acquired full control for €966 million. Perfetti Van Melle was set up in March 2001, Dutch Wikipedia says, and the company says it began trading that year as the world’s third-largest confectionery group. English Wikipedia gives its headquarters as Lainate and Breda; in 2006 it took full ownership of the Spanish lollipop maker Chupa Chups.

Breda remains the centre of the brand. Perfetti Van Melle says its Breda plant is “the largest Mentos-producing facility in the world” and one of the most modern in the group, with fully automated production and packaging and an output of about 33,500 tonnes a year. The group lists 33 plants in all and names Mentos among the main products of its plants in Lainate, Shanghai and Istanbul as well — the Italian and Turkish ones for Mentos gum, which the company says it began making in Europe in 2005. English Wikipedia says Mentos is sold in more than 130 countries.

For a design guide, Mentos shows how a roll, a jingle and a slogan carried a Dutch sweet around the world. Compare Fruittella, the other Van Melle chew the company traces to the same 1932 trip, and Tic Tac, Ferrero’s mint. For this guide we use a deep blue, a fresh green and white with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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