It is not hard to chart the precipitous rise of the Mentos corporation. Their trajectory toward achieving undisputed market dominance within both the pharmacology and confectionery sectors, becoming the soft candy luminaries they are celebrated as today, can be traced back to a singular launching point: the acquisition of an unwanted medical patent in November 2020.

Before this deal came to pass, however, the Freshmaker was on a path toward obsolescence. It was a relic of a company whose flagship item, the non-medicinal Mentos, had seen its popularity with consumers steadily wane since the mid 1990s until it reached a nadir at the turn of the millenia, wallowing in supermarket bargain bin doldrums and joining the ignoble peerage of products such as Los Angeles Ice and Fisherman’s Friend¹. In its original conception, the trademark semi-porous dragee shell was intended only to deliver minted breath to its consumer, creating the illusion of freshness within the mouth². This made it part of a glut of mint candies on the market where, vis-à-vis the Cola Wars³, competitors were stuck in a cycle of reinventing the wheel and then letting it spin. Novelty was the prime deliverable, and novelty was what Mentos lacked.

1.  Information is scarce on these two products, but what experts have managed to decrypt from unearthed advertising copy suggests that the primary purpose of L.A.I. and F.F. was to be gaming and/or marine leisure ‘fuel’.
2.  For further reading on the psychosocial effects of fresh-mouth, see R.J. Lumbug’s The Freshness Phenomenon (2031)
3.  I won’t go into detail here, as anyone who attended a Freshmaker secondary college would have studied the Cola Wars in Marketing History ad nauseam.

The Freshmaker saw the writing on the wall, of course. They knew there was no space left to maneuver within the confectionery market, so they turned their attention to what was then considered a parallel industry: pharmaceuticals. Mission statements collected from the initial briefs suggested that The Freshmaker was digging for something that could give their product a physiological edge, something that could generate a (mostly) harmless internal buzz. Red Bull’s plumbing of Naturopathy for Taurine was used as a reference guide for the level of narcotic strength they would need. Of course, caffeine was always in the discussion, even at these early stages, and it would even see production later with the doomed rollout of Mentos Black⁴. However, this continued just to be a retreading of tired ideas. It wasn’t until the acquisitions team shook hands with the beleaguered supplier Thinkjet that the fires of innovation were lit. 

4.  Mentos Black was a caffeinated dragee that failed to gain a market foothold over its five year lifespan. This was chiefly due to the consumption trend of Caffeine Stacking, whereby habitual caffeine consumers were prone to simultaneously dose during meals. As coffee was the reigning caffeine king (or queen), pairing it with a minty chewable proved to cause too much palate chaos to be enjoyable.

A bit of background: Thinkjet was the pharmaceutical patent holder for a nootropic drug known as Renafadinil. Nootropics (from the Greek for ‘a turning of the mind’) were a class of wholly ineffectual cognitive enhancers, and were far from hot property. Additionally, even before meeting with Mentos, Thinkjet were no strangers to intersector patent trading, having bought out the rights-of-replication for the 2-pyrrolidone nucleus, which was previously languishing as a patent protected atomic structure for use in increasingly redundant inkjet cartridges, its organically miscible properties promoting uniform inking⁵. This nucleus was core to Renafadinil production, allowing Thinkjet to slap on a class of nootropic active ingredients known as Racetams and push their little piggy all the way to market.

5.  It is this former owner of the 2-pyrrolidone nucleus from which Thinkjet, presumably, also lifted its corporate moniker.

Unfortunately, in an almost unilateral international response⁶ from the world’s Medical Watchdogs, drugs containing Racetams were strongly discouraged against being medically prescribed as, following rigorous clinical trials, the side-effects and dosage requirements remained inconclusive. Ostensibly, Renafadinil did nothing, but it did so in a way that was measurable in the blood levels of test patients, and that was more liability than any medical practice was willing to shoulder. Effectively, the whole thing was a wash, and Thinkjet were left in the cold with a drug that a legally enforced sense of medical integrity prevented them from advertising.

6.  There were some European nations that freely permitted Racetam prescriptions, but their names and borders have changed numerous times since 2020, and a few turned out to be corporate puppet nations established to manufacture banned colouring agents in children’s popcorn.

As it turned out, though, food safety laws were a different matter entirely. Thinkjet were looking to sell, and Renafadinil was sterile, non-toxic, and clinically proven to be non-medicinal⁷, which made it fit for consumption right off the shelf, provided it was marketed as a snack instead of a drug. The then mutually floundering Mentos and Thinkjet corporations thus struck a deal and, on November 12, 2020, the Renafadinil patent was purchased to absolutely zero fanfare or public scrutiny. What happened next was probably the single most important event in recent human history. 

7.  This requirement to be non-medicinal makes one question why The Freshmaker didn’t simply follow Red Bull’s footsteps into Naturopathy, but it is moot at this point.

Looking back, one could certainly label it as criminally negligent, but the happy accident that would become Compos Mentos started that very month with the gung-ho production of Renafadinil treated Mentos by The Freshmaker. The corporation needed to turn a profit on their deal with Thinkjet as soon as possible, and Legal felt that they could conflate the connotative differences between the phrases ‘No known side-effects’ and ‘Unknown side-effects’ before a jury. As a result, the hastily prepared product trial of Mentos White⁸ was flavour tested on volunteer internal staff by early December. The result: it tasted like Mentos, but slightly more bitter. 

8.  Mentos White was originally designed as a companion to Mentos Black, which was currently enjoying a novelty boon on its sales figures. However, once these figures began to tank, all association to the black/white dichotomy was scrubbed from Mentos branding.

For preliminary results, this was quite encouraging, as any product that boasted physically ameliorative properties needed to taste worse than the alternative to be believable. Market research had already proved this inverse relationship between perceived health benefits and quality of flavour⁹, so production was increased and the trial extended. In the following weeks, however, a startling effect was discovered, something that was unable to be plotted on the 5-point flavour scales. Every single trial participant, without exception, had become noticeably better at their job. They were better at everything, in fact. They were more efficient, more focussed, and were able to effortlessly grasp complex concepts¹⁰. Through absolute serendipity, and a little desperation, Mentos had made Renafadinil actually work. Obviously, the Taste Technicians helming the project had no idea how this had happened and, under the Colonel’s Clause¹¹, it would be decades until the public were enlightened to the chemical miracle taking place within each chewable dragee. Regardless, the Mentos corporation had a moneymaker on their hands, and they took the opportunity to revitalise their corporate image and rebrand themselves, finally, as The Freshmaker we know today.

9.  See Chesterfield & Dale’s So Bad It’s Good in The Journal of Flavornomics (2019)
10.  A recorded example of this was the steep decline of internal misdials, staff now fully grokking the ‘floor number>room number>phone extension’ dialling process.
11.  The Colonel’s Clause was a legal precedent set during the trial of The People vs. KFC (1973) that protected the rights of corporations to withhold ingredient lists of their food products, e.g. the Colonel’s 11 veiled herbs and spices, or Ronald’s ‘secret sauce’. In a post Compos Mentos world, though, it really became trivial for anyone to perform the required titrimetric analysis to identify these ingredients.

Phase one was renaming the product; a new era of candy called for a fresh title. The name Compos Mentos was a result of the Innovation Team’s brainstorming, conceived as a portmanteau of Mentos, both the soft-shelled dragee and the traditional Jamaican folk dance done in duple time¹², and the phrase Compos Mentis, meaning ‘to have full control of one’s mind’. As a bonus, the Compos part was in latin, which was the language of smart people¹³. The rest of the product rollout was silky smooth, as most of The Freshmaker’s frontline employees were involved in the internal trials and were enjoying the heightened levels of intelligence and acuity that it gave them. All it took for consumers to invest in a tube of Compos Mentos were a few persuasive words and the clear, demonstrable effects. Once it had just the slightest momentum, the product sold itself.

12.  The exact etymology of Mentos is hazy, but Freshmaker historians insist that it was indeed a progressive celebration of Jamaican culture.
13.  Unfortunately none of the members of the Innovation Team had been involved in the internal trials of Compos Mentos.

The consumption of Compos Mentos then exploded. The Mentos advertising campaigns during its 1990s heyday depicting fresh-thinking individuals innovating solutions to problems such as sitting on wet paint in your suit pants, or losing the keys to your yacht, took on an eerily prophetic dimension. The sharp minded individuals in the adverts were now a reality, innovation within the mundane existing on every street corner. There was no answer that seemed to be out of reach to someone that was near a supermarket and had $2.50 in their pocket¹⁴. The utter lack of regulation within the confectionery sector allowed Compos Mentos to globally proliferate and fill the pockets of every socio-economic background before governments had time to squint down to street level.

14.  Even accounting for inflation, this was a gross underpricing of the drug, and a massive oversight by The Freshmaker.

The reaction was mixed. The initial intake was disruptive, socially, but it by no means affected the status quo immediately. Incumbent holders of rank and status viewed the swelling class of intelligentsia as precocious, as having not earned their intelligence like they had done themselves. Compos Mentos was considered to be a shortcut to success, and those who abused the drug were labelled as lazy. This opinion did not hold water for long, as Compos Mentos consumers became the most sought after workers in all industries. Once The Freshmaker started to drive up the dosage prices¹⁵, the overheads for a continued prescription required that you held constant, full-time employment. Thus, Compos Mentos workers were reliable, capable, and rarely became threatening entrepreneurs as wealth remained to be the greatest barrier to upwards mobility.

15.  Though it can be said of The Freshmaker that their genius was borne by chance, no one argues against their prodigious profiteering.

In the following decade, there was a period of relative equilibrium, which gave the world time to break down how exactly this new drug/candy was working. Using a sample size on a global scale, researchers were able to determine that the increase in intelligence was not influenced by physiological or psychological factors¹⁶. Whether you were a product of nature or nurture, it simply did not matter, Compos Mentos would ensure that you reached a baseline level of cognition. This baseline was the most important finding. The effect was not additive, it merely brought all users up to the same level of mental dexterity, something that was overlooked for a long time as the benchmark was far, far above the global average. There did exist wunderkinds that saw no improvement in consuming Compos Mentos, but they accounted for an estimated 0.00001% of the population¹⁷. This put a lot of pressure on corporations and governments to implement dosage schemes, as stakeholders were not confident that the Politicians and CEOs were as intelligent as a: they could be, or b: they thought they were. This was the social climate in the mid 2030s and, perhaps for the first time, it looked as if the ruling minority had become too small to effectively rule anymore. 

16.  See Bandara, Ida, Gonzalez, et. al ‘A Longitudinal Study of 10 Million Compos Mentos Users’ in Fresh Science (2032) 
17.  Known wunderkinds of this calibre include Renoit Silva, who devoted his life to stamp collecting, and Cho-hee Jeong, last seen orbiting Neptune.  

Division ruptures the sites of change, however, and anti-Freshmaker cells solidified in the turbulent latter half of the 2030s. It was during this time that the side-effects began to surface: oral ingestion lead to chronic neohalitus¹⁸, induced ageusia¹⁹ caused by the erosion of the tongue’s papillae, and a sallowing of the skin. These symptoms were manageable and decreased in severity once it became common knowledge that, once the Racetam infused glutamates were greasing your neurons, the effect was binary and excessive consumption of Compos Mentos conferred no further benefit. The Freshmaker themselves took steps to mitigate health risks, adding a fluoride dusting to the shell to lessen tooth decay, though the resulting whiteness of teeth did make consumers’ yellowing complexions more pronounced.

18.  Pathological freshness of breath. From the Greek Neo, new or fresh, and halitus, breath. 
19.  A loss of taste. From the Greek A-, without, geusis, taste, and -ia, no known meaning.

Reactionaries pounced on this, dubbing pro-Freshmaker groups as ‘smooth-tongues’²⁰ and challenging the long-term safety of dosing. Among their raft of grievances²¹, this was the most compelling, but general opinion held that the Compos Mentos users should be entrusted to identify the risks involved.

20.  No doubt a riff on the popular trolling term ‘smooth brain’, though in this instance, the ‘trolls’ were more likely to be afflicted with the aforementioned lissencephaly.
21.  Post Compos Mentos many lobbying groups were forced to unite under a single anti-Freshmaker banner due to dwindling numbers. The breadth of this group’s anti-issues included, but was not limited to: anti-vaccination, anti-self driving cars, anti-loose fitting clothes, and anti-aerosol paints. 

Moreover, with the arrival of Compos Mentos intravenous slosh bags and on-the-go suppositories²², improvements to the recipe and mode of ingestion saw these symptoms reduce in severity even further. By the late 2040s, anti-Freshmaker groups were little more than agitators distracting from a bigger movement that threatened genuine social upheaval: the democratisation of education. Now that intelligence was considered to be uniform²³, the farce of entrance examinations and privatised schooling was fully exposed. Ultimately, the only thing that gated entry to education was money, which understandably led to massive social destabilisation as millions of painfully undereducated working class articulated, as peers, the ill that society wreaked upon itself by letting its labourers go on unskilled.

22.  This product regrettably caused the infamous anti-Freshmaker chant for identifying suppository users: ‘Rough on the tongue, rough on the bum’.
23.  Despite this, IQ tests consistently returned variable results, which saw their credibility as a metric permanently damaged. 

The pressures that mounted then are still mounting today. Progress is being seen in breaking barriers to entry of all vocations. Politicians are now required to dose and, with the aid of performance enhancing drugs, they are at last performing to an expected standard. They build the futures for the children of a brave new frontier, united under a common understanding and a sickly, yellow pallor. I, myself, owe The Freshmaker and Compos Mentos for the means with which to write this paper. Were it not for the risk they took in 2020, encouraged by looming irrelevancy and bankruptcy, I likely would not be in my current position within academia. Indeed, The Freshmaker stands alone, with no competitors or imitators in view²⁴. Their candy monopoly has, ironically, unshackled many of us who would have otherwise been born in chains. I know not what lies ahead, but I do know this: the future is fresh. 

24.  Other food empires have tried to follow The Freshmaker’s footsteps, but none shared the same success. Pringles’ once you pop you can’t stop slogan was not well received well in the world of candied prescription medication, and Coke was too reluctant to jump fully in, having spent so long trying to shed its drug related past. Tic-Tacs saw the most success, but lost traction during the decades of stigma as the sound of a festive Tic-Tac maracca rattling in the pocket was reason enough to attract discrimination.