3 Tic Tac Flavors You Definitely Forgot About

Tic Tacs are a little more adventurous than we give them credit for sometimes. These teeny little mints come in more flavors than we remember (making them more of a fully-fledged candy, really – although let’s be real, they’ll always be mints to most of us), and over the years, there have been a lot of different varieties. The last few years have seen a particular push towards innovation in Tic Tac Land, especially when it comes to combining them with drink flavors, with Sprite Tic Tacs and Dr. Pepper Tic Tacs coming our way. Busy old time. 

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But flavors rise, and flavors fall – and throughout the years, there have been a lot of Tic Tacs that didn’t go the distance. We’re raising a glass to a few forgotten Tic Tac flavors. 

Tic Tac Grape

Grape was one of Tic Tac’s earliest flavors, and part of a group of options that included cinnamon, strawberry, and perhaps somewhat more niche, aniseed. On paper, this should have been a winner: Grape-flavored candy is hard to seriously mess up, and it can also get tiresome fairly quickly (for some of us, anyway), making the delivery vehicle of small morsels in an easily closable pack pretty attractive. 

However, it wasn’t to be – thanks to how they were made. Grape Tic Tacs were dyed with amaranth, a red food dye and suspected carcinogen that was banned in the US in 1976. These Tic Tacs went with it, and while grape flavors have come back in a few different iterations (like the Grape Lychee flavor released in 2011), a flagship, high-profile Grape Tic Tac hasn’t made a splash since. 

Tic Tac Passion Fruit

2007 was the year that Tic Tac lent into tropical flavors, and specifically, into a passion fruit option. Passion Fruit Tic Tacs came out in the summer of that year, as a limited-edition option that was probably never intended to become a permanent fixture of its line-up. This flavor was released primarily in European countries, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. 

After a short while, though, it was discontinued. That wasn’t the end of the line for Passion Fruit Tic Tacs: The flavor has shown up again here and there in combo flavors, but it hasn’t had the starring role that it once had. 

Tic Tac Popcorn

Tic Tacs or popcorn? Why not both in one? Maybe that was the sales pitch behind this flavor, which showed up in the mid-2010s and apparently offered a solution to having to balance a big old bucket of popcorn as you sidled through the rows of a movie theater. Now, you could keep the flavor in your pocket. 

Did Popcorn Tic Tacs work? Err…kinda? Reviewers who tried these Tic Tacs at the time noted that they were weirdly, almost unnervingly, popcorn-flavored. If verisimilitude is what you go for in your candy, you would have loved these – but they were also, apparently, just a bit weird. As someone who’s always found popcorn jelly beans a bit hard to handle, I think I’d probably agree.