Spree
The tart candy discs that came rattling out of every bowling-alley and skating-rink vending machine in the 90s — a roll of fruit-shelled dots that outlasted a few games or a few laps around the rink. A mid-1960s invention that a later generation claimed completely.
Spree was created by the Sunline Candy Company — later renamed Sunmark Corporation — of St. Louis, Missouri, in the mid-1960s. The formula was deceptively simple: compressed-dextrose candy discs wrapped in a colored, fruit-flavored tart shell, sold in rolls and in theater-size boxes. That tart first hit, softening into sweetness as the disc wore down, was the whole personality of the thing.
For bowling-alley kids and roller-rink regulars, Spree was less a grocery purchase than a venue purchase: coins into the vending machine, the clunk, the roll rattling into the tray. It was the candy of rented shoes and disco-lit rink floors, paced perfectly for the setting — a roll could last through a few frames or a few laps, one disc clicking against your teeth at a time.
Over the years the brand folded into the Willy Wonka Candy lineup, picked up a Chewy Spree variant with a candy shell and a chewy center, and today belongs to the Ferrara Candy Company, a unit of Ferrero. The roll itself never really changed — which is why one rattle of discs in a paper tube can still teleport a certain generation straight back to lane nine.
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