Nestlé Magic Ball
A foil-wrapped hollow milk-chocolate ball with a plastic capsule inside, and inside that a tiny Disney figure: Hercules, Simba and the rest of a 24-figure set. Nestlé Magic hit U.S. shelves in 1997 at about a dollar, was pronounced safe by federal toy testers, and was pulled by October anyway, because a 1938 law says candy cannot have a toy inside it.
Nestlé Magic was America's answer to the Kinder Surprise, the European chocolate egg with a toy inside that U.S. law does not allow. Introduced in 1997, it was a hollow milk-chocolate ball around a plastic capsule holding one of 24 small figures from Disney films, including that summer's Hercules, and it sold for about a dollar. The problem was the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which prohibits confectionery with "any nonnutritive object" embedded in it. The FDA told Nestlé the product violated the law; Nestlé sold it anyway while lobbying Congress to change the rule.
The fight that followed pulled in everyone. State attorneys general led by Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal opposed it as a choking hazard, and rival Mars mounted a lobbying campaign against it. On August 29, 1997 the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced it had tested all 24 figures against its small-parts rules, including sharp-point and use-and-abuse tests, and found that none of them posed a choking hazard, an announcement that came shortly after the same agency recalled Kinder eggs over their small toy parts.
It did not matter. Nestlé had reported twelve incidents of children gagging on the figures to federal officials, none requiring medical attention, and on October 1, 1997 Nestlé USA announced it was withdrawing the product voluntarily, citing an unresolved legal problem rather than safety. "We stand by the product's safety," a spokeswoman said.
The chocolate came back in April 2000 as the Wonder Ball, with candy where the toy had been and the slogan "What's in the Wonder Ball?"; Nestlé sold that brand to Frankford in 2004, and an urban legend that it was discontinued in 2007 after a choking death has never been confirmed. The 1997 figures are collectibles now, and every time a Kinder egg is seized at the border the Nestlé Magic story gets told again.
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