Wisconsin Skittles Spill Solved, But Candy Maker Has Questions

Hundreds of thousands of Skittles candies were spilled on an icy rural Wisconsin highway Tuesday, and now officials at Mars Inc. are launching an investigation to find out why the discarded candies were loaded on the back of a truck and shipped off to become cattle feed in the first place, according to news and social media reports.

The whole thing created quite a mess on Dodge County Highway S, about 70 miles northwest of Milwaukee. A steady rain soaked the boxes that had been loaded — surreptitiously, it seems — on the flatbed pickup. The boxes collapsed in the rain and painted the road a rosy hue that caused at least one motorist to wonder if a deer had met an untimely end.

The Skittles spill was a mystery for sure. Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt said on the department’s Facebook page that he didn’t know quite what to make of it. He wasn’t even sure the scattered candies were Skittles until they passed the smell test. And ever the sleuth, he pointed to a clue that didn't make sense to anyone who knows anything about Skittles.

“There’s no little ‘S’ on them, but you can definitely smell, it’s a distinct Skittles smell,” Schmidt told WISN-TV, an affiliate of CNN, which shared the story with a national audience, who must be wondering if there is a course at the police academy on Skittles detection.

Schmidt has kept Wisconsinites entertained with his updates on the Skittles saga, borrowing the candy’s slogan and noting it was “difficult to ‘Taste the Rainbow’ in its entirety” because only red candies spilled from the truck. What was up with that, commenters wondered. Later, when investigators determined the Skittles were to be ground up and added to cattle feed, Schmidt posted the candies were “actually for the birds” after they ended up on the highway.

The sheriff’s post has been shared at least 1,675 times and has drawn hundreds of comments, including one from a man who said he was reminded of the animated film “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” in which a washed up local scientist invents a machine that makes the skies rain meatballs. He becomes a hero, but of course, things go horribly wrong.

Someone else noted county road ditches turned purple overnight and wondered if it was a Skittles effect. Another Facebook user speculated the trucker had spilled the Skittles for traction, the same way some people use cat litter products in slippery conditions: “The poor guy must have ran out of salt and sand but needed traction on all that ice.”

(Actually, that may have been the upside of the sticky mess resulting from the Skittles strewn across the highway, road workers cleaning it up told WISN.)

On and on the Facebook conversation went, with one good joke after another.

“This made my entire week,” someone posted.

As Wisconsin residents had a good time on Facebook, officials at Mars Inc.’s corporate offices in New York City weren’t as worried about how the Skittles spilled as they were about how they ended up on the back of a truck on a rural Wisconsin highway to begin with.

The spilled Skittles should have been destroyed after they didn’t get trademark “S” stamp due to a power failure, a Mars Inc. official told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Mars investigators plan to the farmer to find out more about the unauthorized Skittles shipment, company spokeswoman Denise Young told the newspaper.

Food products like Skittles routinely are used as cheap carbs in animal feed, and Mars does have processes to allow that at some of its production facilities. But that wasn’t the case at the undisclosed plant that produced the candies that ended up on the Wisconsin road.

Photo via Dodge County Sheriff’s Office