Ice Breakers Liquid Ice
Hershey's 2004 mint with a liquid center and a flavor the trade press called an intense burst, sold with a Jessica Simpson campaign built on her tuna-or-chicken moment: "Is it liquid or is it ice?" It was quietly discontinued, and a 2018 petition asking Hershey to bring it back is still collecting signatures.
Ice Breakers started life in the 1990s as a Nabisco mint, made by the company's LifeSavers division to compete with the other breath-mint brands on the counter. In 2000 Hershey bought it from Nabisco for $135 million in a deal that also brought over Bubble Yum, Breath Savers and CareFree. Liquid Ice, a liquid-filled mint, arrived in March 2004 in a single Cool Mint flavor, according to the Hershey Community Archives' own product chronology (Wikipedia and the fans' petition both say 2003), with an advertising and public-relations campaign built around Jessica Simpson.
The television push came two months later. On May 24, 2004, Liquid Ice broke its first national broadcast campaign, spots titled "Is It Liquid? Or Is It Ice?" from the agency North Castle Partners, in which Jessica and her sister Ashlee debate the question while the ads nod to Jessica's earlier confusion over whether Chicken of the Sea was chicken or tuna and whether buffalo wings came from buffaloes. MediaPost's write-up sounded like the packaging: "the small round mints are filled with liquid-an intense burst of flavor-that dissolves immediately." Spearmint and Cinnamon followed in August 2004, the brand released dual-pack gum and mints the same year, and later in 2004 it signed Hilary and Haylie Duff as its spokeswomen. Alpine Splash and Citrus Freeze flavors arrived in March 2005, the last Liquid Ice entry in Hershey's chronology.
Then Liquid Ice went away, and nothing fetched for this entry says exactly when or why; collector sites mention complaints about the intensity of the flavor, but no Hershey announcement has turned up. What survives is the longing. A Change.org petition created on September 9, 2018, asks the Hershey Company to bring it back, mourning the mint's "nostalgic, bubbly, wonderful minty taste" from what it remembers as "it's release in stores in 2003 to its sad, sad discontinuation," and sealed containers trade on eBay as a vintage curiosity. The brand's later experiments got more attention for the wrong reasons: in 2007 Ice Breakers Pacs, a powdered mint in a dissolving pouch, drew national criticism for resembling street drugs, and Hershey pulled them soon after.
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