Newly Minted

By Susan Sprague Yeske, Food Editor
The Trenton Times | March 24, 2004

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3 Ivy League graduates satisfying cravings with six flavors of artistically designed mints

On especially warm days, you can still catch the scent of the chocolate wafting through The Chocolate Factory, a converted confectionary in Hopewell Borough. But in the upstairs offices of Oral Fixation LLC, the primary fragrance is mint, the result of entrepreneurial endeavors of three Ivy League graduates.

New Jersey native and Harvard University grad Henry Rich has a degree in philosophy that he hopes to someday use in foreign service. In the meantime, he and Princeton University grads Jeremy Kahn and Jonathan Harris have turned their 23-year-old minds and talents to creating, packaging and marketing the six varieties of Oral Fixation Mints.

The partnership began over wine cases at the Princeton Corkscrew wine store in Princeton Borough. Rich and Kahn were working there, hoping to learn about wine and instead learning about stocking shelves.

Deciding they wanted to create and market an original product, the pair teamed up with Harris who has computer and arts training.

“We wanted to create something that was both beautiful and functional,” said Rich, who is President of the company. “something different from the mass-marketed products that people are sick of.”

The idea for mints, and the company’s name, came from a chance remark from a friend who was trying to quit smoking.

“He said he hand an oral fixation” that had to be satisfied, Rich said.

A mint could help him deal withy him fixation, the agreed, and could appeal to a wide market that is accustomed to using mints as breath fresheners and to aid digestion.

So the trio set to work making mints, even though none of them knew anything about candy making, and Harris designed eye-catching credit-card-shaped tins, designs for imprinting on the mints and the company’s Web site.

Some Web surfing produced the name of a retired flavor expert who had worked with Lifesavers candies, Rich said. He was hired to create the six flavors and recipes for the hard candies, five of which are sweetened with sorbitol instead of sugar: Classical Peppermint, 7 Deadly Cinnamon, Spare Mint (spearmint flavored), Mojito Mint (lime and mint) and Sugar Free Tibet (a portion of the proceeds goes to aid the freedom fight in Tibet). One mint, Night Light, which is a chai flavor that includes caffeine, is sweetened with sugar.

Using “only the best mint oil,” the partners began hand-pressing their mints on a World War II vintage tablet machine at The Chocolate Factory. They subsequently found space at an approved food preparation site in Bucks County, Pa.

On the market for about three months, the mints can be found locally at the Princeton Corkscrew wine Shop and Small World Café in Princeton Borough, The Brothers Moon Restaurant in Hopewell and American Harvest in East Brunswick. In New York City they are satisfying the tastes of opera patrons at The Metropolitan Opera in New York City and art fans at the Whitney Museum along with a variety of exclusive spas, high-end hotels, fashion boutiques and specialty grocers across the country.

As part of their promotion, they pt their product into the hands of a half-dozen celebrities including Britney Spears, Carmen Electra, Tim Robbins, Angela Basset, Mariska Hargitay and Janet Jackson.

Feedback on the slender tins has outpaced the mints, Rich said, with reports they are being used as “wallets” because they can hold credit cards or cash and ID, and can slip easily into a pocket.

At $3 a tin, they are a little pricier than their nearest competition. Altoids Mints, which sell for about 50 cents less are made by the conglomerate Phillip Morris.

A second life as a wallet might make Oral Fixation mints more attractive to customers.

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