Tic-Tac-Taid

While I'm not lactose intolerant ¹ Currently. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, spit over your left shoulder, etc. I have a lot of friends who are, and so as a generous host I like to keep Lactaid on hand. I noticed that the letters for the Tic Tac logo could be moved around to make Lactaid, so I figured rather than keep them in the normal packaging I could make a custom box: ² After all, what could go wrong when explicitly putting drugs in a candy container?

Once again, iPhone's default HDR made putting this picture in the blog really annoying because the whites dull out the rest of the site. Raw exporting in macOS Preview didn't fix it, but sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 90 img.heic --out img.jpg did.

Yumm, artificially flavored mints meds ³

The process

This was relatively straightforward to do. The first step was my favorite: I bought a box of Tic Tacs ⁴ Can't believe that their alternate name of Pic Poc never caught on. and ate them. Then I peeled off the label as best I could, reassembled it, and scanned it on a flatbed scanner so I could start duplicating it.

Which you should be! Tic Tacs are labeled as 0 calories and 0g of sugar despite being mostly sugar because of two loopholes:

1. The FDA allows any food with <5 calories per serving to claim 0 calories, and <0.5g of sugar to claim 0g of sugar — Tic Tacs are 2 calories and only 0.49g (albeit 93.3% sugar)
2. Serving sizes are defined by FDA reference amounts, and while Tic Tacs would normally fall under "Hard candies, breath mints" at 2g (8 calories and 2g of sugar) or more accurately "Hard candies, roll-type, mini-size in dispenser packages" at 5g (20 calories and 5g of sugar) because they're "breath mints" they're set to exactly 1 unit (along with eggs, ice cream cones, and single pieces of gum).

Why this exemption? Because in 1994 Ferrero, the manufacturer of Tic Tacs, asked the FDA to add it. Gotta love the free market.

You can flip the image if you're curious about the nutrition information ⁵

There's a tradeoff between accuracy and work that no one will notice. Does the exact shade of orange matter? Does the font for "ORANGE" on top? How accurate does the back need to be when there's no "ingredients" equivalent for medicine? ⁶ Technically because this is a supplement they actually have started listing more of these. Microcrystalline cellulose! Colloidal silicon dioxide! Other stuff! What is the barcode equivalent?

Here's what I went with. You can download the raw Photoshop PSD file if you want to print your own, or tweak it.

Again, feel free to flip the image

The main bit I wanted was the core logo (all of the characters are composed from the original pieces, which is why the 'd' is lovingly wonky), the cow ⁷ The Lactaid cow unfortunately has no name, which is a tragedy. They also canonically have no udder, which I guess maybe works for a lactase enzyme product? in lieu of the orange, and a fun barcode. ⁸ The barcode is 6C616374616964, which is hexadecimal for 'lactaid'! Then all you need to do is print it out at the right scale (1.5" wide, 3.75" tall, which should match the PSD file) and stick it on a scrubbed box.

For the actual pills I bought an (affiliate) box of 60 Lactaid capsules, and stripped off the individual pill wrappers. This fills the box, and while they're easier to add before putting on the new wrapper (because you can take off the top) you can always channel your inner PEZ dispenser refiller ⁹ Fun fact, PEZ made custom dispensers for JFK, Jackie, and their daughter Caroline which are estimated to be the most valuable in the world (their whereabouts are unknown). Picture goes hard too. National Treasure 3 anyone?
and feed them in through the mouth.

The process (again)

I recently went to do this again for a friend but I couldn't find the original 1oz Tic Tac boxes for sale: some combination of supply chain difficulties and clever price raising ¹⁰ It's not shrinkflation because there are more mints, but the price per mint goes up. Bulkflation? led to the 1oz version being supplanted by a 1.7oz box with 100 mints (somehow still pretending the serving size is 1 mint).

With a larger size you need a larger wrapper to go over it (and about double the Lactaid), so I mocked up a new one. I was in a bit of a hurry, so it's not as perfect as I'd like (and I've somehow lost the PSD file) but it worked:

This was on a mediocre printer, but bright orange in general is pretty tough for CMYK: magenta and yellow can only take you so far. But if you're doing spot color printing for your Tic Tac parody case you've probably gone too far. Probably.

Old mock ¹¹ vs. the new wrapper size (flip!) Updated Lactaid version

And here it is in the real world!

The 1.7oz box... ...with its new wrapper!

Just don't leave it out around the kids.