Retro Candy Flashback: Nik’L'Nip

Wednesday, October 3, 2007 - by Jamie

When I look back on my youth, it occurs to me that I attended roughly 5,082 birthday parties between the ages of 2-11. I grew up in a neighborhood full of kids – we were never lacking in kickball players, manhunt raiders, or prisoners of water balloon war. There were so many of us that there was a birthday party about every two weeks, which made the painful wait between the major candy holidays (by which I mean Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter) go by much quicker, thanks to the glorious birthday party tradition of Goodie Bags.

Let us take a minute to give it up for the Goodie Bag, a wondrous hodgepodge of sweets and plastic toys! Being invited to a birthday party where Doritos, Chee-tos, Fritos, and other assorted “tos” were piled high in Tupperware bowls and a lunch of hot pizza was washed down with a slab of ice cream cake was wonderful. If that wasn’t enough though, a grown-up actually handed us a bag of candy on our way out the door, as if to say, “Thank you for coming to my kid’s party – but the party doesn’t stop here! Take this bag of sugar home and keep on rockin!”

Of course, certain Goodie Bags were better than others: a pack of sugar-free gum and a bottle of bubbles was okay, but not great. A pair of color changing sunglasses and a box of new crayons were nice, but not stellar. Honestly, all little baubles and gifts were a treat, and appreciated, but every so often, you’d hit the mother load: a Goodie Bag that had the Stix and the Bottles. Cha-ching!!!

The Stix, of course, were Pixy Stix, which I will be reviewing very soon, and the Bottles, the sweet, sweet Bottles, were the wax/juice combo known as Nik’L'Nip.

In theory, Nik’L'Nip should be a disgusting salve that your orthodontist puts over your braces after a tightening: “It’s wax… with juice in it! Sounds great, doesn’t it, Railroad Tracks!?”

This, however, is not the case. Nik’L'Nip are a delicious old school gem that continue to make people happy with the simple combo of super sweet juice (think Teeni drinks or a melted Flavor-Ice) locked inside a piece of bottle-shaped wax. Finding a Nik’L'Nip in a Goodie Bag was like finding a quarter in your pocket on Laundry Day in college. There is really nothing better.

Eating the Nik’L'Nips was trickier than I remembered. At first, I tried biting the tips off of the bottles in order to squeeze the juice out, but I ended up squirting the juice backwards and losing it completely. I even tried taking smaller bites, but the juice still dribbled onto my hand. I finally just decided to stick the whole thing in my mouth and chew, which was a bit like chewing a piece of Chewels gum, except the hard exterior in this case is wax, and should probably be thrown away once the juice is gone.

There is something about a candy you loved when you were very small that can instantly bring you back to a very happy moment. When I picked up a pack of (super-cheap, still!) Nik’L'Nip to review, I was just as excited as I’d been as a kid. Leaving the store, I felt like I’d just left a really great birthday party. And then, of course, I went back to the store and bought some Pixy Stix and a pair of color-changing sunglasses, because even grown-ups deserve a Goodie Bag once in a while.

Buy Nik’L'Nip Online:

• at Candy Crate
• at Old Time Candy
• in bulk at Amazon.com

juice, wax, childhood