Member Candy?

A few days ago my brother sent me a text asking me what my favorite flavor of Original New York Seltzer was.  I was a little surprised since I hadn’t seen any of that awesome stuff on store shelves for several decades – I assumed it was a Western New York thing and was probably not made anymore anyway.  I answered “black cherry”, remembering the feel of the bottles and the “peely-ness” of the Styrofoam labels more than the taste of the beverage.  He sent me a pic so now I wanted some.

Quickly, to the Internet!

Although I could get it shipped at an absolutely glorious markup from a number of places online I was curious to see if I could get it locally.  Using the “store locator” at the company’s website, I discovered that this exotic import can only be purchased at two places within 25 miles of me, both of which are World Markets.  I searched around my brother’s area expecting to see dozens of red markers within that same radius, in preps for writing up my “I’m so jealous” paragraph for this post.  Nope.  I had to expand the circle out to 200 miles for the website to start marking up the map – the closest location to him was a truck stop 2 ½ hours away.
 
So, not too sure where he got it.  It’s likely the company’s site’s map is not quite up to date.  On the bright side, maybe they sell it closer to me than a 30-minute drive!  Woo hoo!  On the other hand, maybe they don’t sell it at all…

Great, now I’m all sad.

That pic got the conversation rolling between my brother, sister, and I about candies we enjoyed as kids.  Of course, ZotZ came up but they are all over the place now.  But what I remember having was a ZotZ-like candy but it was hard to describe.  Picture just the stuff inside ZotZ, but compressed into little irregular white sticks.  They sorta kinda looked like tiny albino Cheetos.  Not a lot of info to do a Google Search on.

My brother said he vaguely remembered them and said the bag might be black, with an astronaut on it.  I said YES! to the black bag part, but a wasn’t sure about the astronaut part.  Since we had a little more to go on we searched around and discovered that yes, there was a candy from that era that met that package description but that was just a Pop Rocks equivalent.  The trail went cold for a bit but one of the side paths I wandered down brought me to this:

Oh, yeah, I ‘member!  I ‘member that eating that stuff was like snorting Tang mixed with the ground-up innards of a triple-A battery.  Good times…

My sister asked if the package had a white or light border and I said YES!  She then sent this pic (from collectingcandy.com):

The brother confirmed that have a match!  So… it was a ZotZ thing after all.  It doesn’t look like they are still made but it does look like there are quite a few folks out there that make their own ZotZ-like candies at home.  Maybe I can reproduce this... Definitely gotta give that a try soon for a rainy day family project!