We went for a day trip today to here:
The PEZ factory! In case this is a mystery PEZ candies are those little sugar bullets that are sold in special dispensers. You flip back the head and a candy comes out. I’ve amassed a collection of Star Wars dispensers that I’m not proud of but I hate the candies and never eat them!
It was a bit of a drive away: over two hours and two states, but it was worth it.
It’s where they make the candies and package them (the dispensers are made in Europe). They have a factory and museum, but since it was a Saturday the factory wasn’t on. But the museum was fantastic.
They have an incredible amount of dispensers on display. Thousands I’m sure, in every category imaginable. Although I secretly hate them I was fascinated by the displays.
The older ones are quite crude (Peter Pan here was from 1969) but the modern ones – almost all licensed – are much more sophisticated.
They had an astonishing amount of slight variants of some of them…
Strange old foreign versions…
Super rare dispensers…
And some very old ones that predate the current ‘head-on-a-stick’ style…
They also had – to our amazement – licensed Japanese ones including Gundam and Ultraman!
But there was so much more than just the dispensers! PEZ is after all a candy (invented in Germany in the 1930s) and they also had an incredible amount of packaging and marketing ephemera on display:
And advertising posters (many featuring the ‘PEZ girls’ used heavily in European advertising):
Bizarre items such as vinyl records:
And then truly strange stuff like a calculator, CCG pack, electronic game and very old sticker:
I loved this museum! It was basically PEZ otaku paradise. I hate PEZ’s (surely they’re the worst ‘candy’ ever made?) but I really loved looking through the small but jam-packed museum.
They even had a treasure hunt going on that we completed and won a prize from:
It was absolutely worth the trip: this place was PEZ-tastic!
But I still hate the candies 🙂
They did have the gun PEZ dispensers!