Whittaker’s new limited-edition block combines white chocolate, bubblegum flavour and five kinds of gumdrop. It sounds like something designed during a school-holiday sugar rush, which is probably why New Zealand will take it extremely seriously.
Whittaker’s has made a bubblegum-flavoured white chocolate block filled with gumdrops, and there is no point pretending the country will respond calmly.
The new Gumdrop Block uses Whittaker’s 28% cocoa white chocolate, bubblegum flavouring and five different gumdrop flavours. It reaches supermarkets on Monday, July 20, with Duck Island launching a matching Bubble Gumdrop ice cream the day before. The first 50 people at each Duck Island store on Sunday will receive a free scoop and a block, which is less a product launch than a carefully organised national lack of restraint. 1News has the full release details here.
On paper, this should be terrible. Bubblegum is not a flavour normally associated with good judgement, while adding chewy lollies to a block of white chocolate sounds like the sort of thing a child would invent after being left unsupervised in a dairy. Whittaker’s chief marketing officer Soraya Cottin has called it one of the company’s most playful and unexpected releases, which is corporate language for “we know this is slightly unhinged”.
That is also what makes it interesting. Whittaker’s has spent generations becoming the sensible adult of the New Zealand confectionery aisle. The company makes its chocolate in Porirua, talks seriously about cocoa quality and maintains the kind of national trust normally reserved for weather presenters and people who return borrowed trailers. That credibility gives it permission to occasionally do something deeply unserious. The company still describes itself as family-owned across four generations, which makes a bubblegum block feel less like a desperate trend grab and more like the responsible family member deciding to wear something strange to dinner.
Limited-edition food works best when it creates an argument before anyone has tasted it. Nobody needs another pleasant variation of milk chocolate that earns polite approval and then disappears into the cupboard. The Gumdrop Block has already done more useful work by forcing people to decide whether bubblegum belongs near cocoa at all.
There will be strong opinions. Some people will call it nostalgic because bubblegum and gumdrops belong to the part of childhood when flavour mainly meant colour. Others will describe it as disgusting before buying one for research. A third group will find the block sold out, complain online and spend the following month behaving as though Whittaker’s has denied them access to medicine.
The Duck Island collaboration pushes the whole idea further. The ice cream company has used Whittaker’s chocolate since opening 11 years ago, and its Bubble Gumdrop flavour will mix pieces of the new block through a bubblegum base. It is not subtle, but subtlety would be a strange ambition here.
Food brands are often told they need to act more like entertainment companies, which usually produces a great deal of content and very little fun. Whittaker’s has taken the easier route and made something people will genuinely want to discuss, taste, photograph and disagree over.
The block may be brilliant. It may taste like a birthday party held inside a scented eraser. Either outcome is more interesting than another salted caramel.
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