by the California-based Din-Don Foods Corp.—were unavailable in every store in the area that sold them, and scalpers were selling individual bags for over $50 on eBay.. It all started when Sprinz began filming himself sampling the gummies for a series of videos showing him biting into various things to prove that his teeth were real. The gummies, which had lingered in the back of his cabinet since that trip to the 99-cent store, seemed like a good candidate.
Sprinz kept uploading videos of himself biting into the giant gummies, and soon a game evolved from it which he dubbed “Hit or Miss”—essentially a gentle version of Russian roulette. The jelly casing pops, and depending on the trajectory of the filling, either splatters the floor with goo, or leaves you with a mouthful of mildly sweet fruit-flavored gelatin, like a large-format Gusher.
Each Hit or Miss has the elegance of a three-act play: the tension before the bite, the main event, the reaction. It’s the perfect premise for a TikTok video, which runs 60 seconds long at the maximum. And the videos were getting Sprinz views and followers—as of the time I’m writing this article, he has 4.9 million of them on TikTok. Within a week or two, copycat videos sprang up on TikTok showcasing other people biting into the candies.
When the jellies arrived, the team played our own game of Hit or Miss in the test kitchen. Biting into the gummies is a disconcerting experience. Either the plastic gives way, and a rush of mildly sweet fruit-flavored jelly goes into your mouth, or you lose most of the contents of the bag to a big splatter of goo on the floor. It’s definitely not the most efficient way to eat candy. But, counterpoint? It’s pretty fun.