🐣 Peeps: A Backroom Marshmallow Mystery

The Best One Yet

Nick & Jack Studios

News, Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/

Roscoe Rodda was in the fight of his life. His candy factory was right down the road from Milton Hershey’s—yes, THAT Hershey’s—and he needed to set himself apart. So Roscoe embraced a single holiday to get the competitive confectionery edge: Easter. Chocolate eggs, jellybeans… and a secret treat painstakingly sculpted behind closed doors: a marshmallow chick with inquisitive waxy black eyes. These chicks circulated in obscurity until a Navy engineer-turned- candymaker molded them into a squishy, sugary phenomenon. (Today, 1.5 billion Peeps are eaten worldwide, just during Easter alone.) Find out how Peeps went from secretive snack to Easter GOAT—and why some people love ‘em, some hate ‘em, but everyone loves exploding them in the microwave. Here’s why Peeps are the best idea yet.

Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet for the untold origin stories of the products you’re obsessed with — and the bold risk takers who made them go viral.

Episodes drop every Tuesday, listen here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yet is Nick and Jack here coming at you from the T-Boy studio.
0:04.6	On our weekly show, The Best Idea Yet, we go deep on the most popular products of all time.
0:10.1	And we recently did a whole story on the most important product of this moment, Peep's.
0:15.7	Because odds are, statistically speaking, this is the one weekend of the year.
0:19.6	You're indulging in Peep's yellow
0:21.6	marshmallow candies. We're looking at you. Now, since stock markets are closed today for Good Friday,
0:26.5	Jack and I whipped up a treat for you. Literally. We're dropping the entire episode that we just did
0:31.8	on Peeps. And then, after you listen to this episode, make sure to go to the show page of the
0:37.2	Best Idea Yet to get new episodes every week.
0:39.8	So follow the best idea yet.
0:41.4	In the meantime, here is the untold wild origin of peeps.
0:51.6	If you were a holiday, Jack, the holiday I think you would most identify with is Labor Day.
0:57.5	Going with Labor Day.
0:58.5	I'm intrigued.
0:59.3	Why do you say this?
1:00.2	Jack, I know you appreciate a short bathing suit to wear.
1:03.1	I know you're proud of your thighs.
1:05.0	I don't want to show those things off.
1:06.8	You can do that on a Labor Day beach.
1:10.1	So you're just thinking about like the seasonality of Labor Day.
1:12.6	Yeah, yeah, kind of.
1:13.5	Not the meaning of valuing work.
	...

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