Toomey’s Mardi Gras, the downtown Mobile shop known for its Carnival throws and candy, has announced its new MoonPie flavor for 2010: mint. Shop owner Stephen Toomey said the new flavor proved so popular that it sold out shortly after its debut, a reception that confirmed what the shop’s regulars had come to expect from the annual ritual of guessing what new variety would appear in the cases each year. The mint version joins a specialty lineup that has become one of the small traditions of Mobile’s Carnival season.
Mint joins the growing lineup of specialty MoonPie flavors the store has rolled out in recent years, following 2009’s well-received peanut butter version, alongside the traditional banana, chocolate, orange, strawberry and vanilla varieties. The classic banana remains the flavor most associated with Mardi Gras tradition, stacked by the box and thrown from floats for generations, but the specialty flavors have carved out their own following among shoppers who treat each year’s release as something to seek out. The peanut butter debut in 2009 set the pattern: a limited-run flavor that drew curious buyers and left the shop fielding requests long after the stock was gone.
The sell-out of the mint flavor, by Toomey’s account, happened quickly, with the first shipment gone not long after it hit the shelves. For a shop whose clientele includes both longtime Carnival veterans and newcomers stocking up for their first parades, the appetite for novelty flavors demonstrates how a century-old treat can keep finding new audiences. The shop’s customers now span multiple generations of families who have made Toomey’s a stop on their pre-Carnival shopping route.
A Mobile Mardi Gras tradition
MoonPies have been a fixture of Mobile’s Mardi Gras celebrations for decades, thrown from floats and sold by the case at shops like Toomey’s in the weeks leading up to Carnival season. The marshmallow-and-graham confection became the throw of choice for mobilians in part because it is inexpensive, durable enough to survive a flight from a float, and unmistakably associated with the Gulf South. While other cities along the coast celebrate with beads and doubloons of their own, the MoonPie belongs to Mobile’s version of Carnival in a way few other treats do.
The tradition took root as parade organizations looked for throws that would delight crowds without breaking the marching societies’ budgets. MoonPies fit the bill, and their popularity with parade-goers made them a standard cargo on floats during the weeks of parades that build toward Fat Tuesday. Generations of children have grown up catching them, and plenty of adults confess to preferences between flavors that they have held since childhood, loyalty that specialty releases like mint now play against.
Specialty flavors have become something of an annual event for local MoonPie fans, with shoppers watching each year to see what new variety local retailers will carry. The anticipation has turned a simple confection into a seasonal talking point, discussed in shops and among parade societies well before the first parade rolls. Each year’s flavor tends to sell strongly at first, drawing back buyers who missed the debut, and then settle into the broader assortment alongside the standards.
The shop behind the flavor
Toomey’s Mardi Gras has built a reputation among Mobile Carnival-goers for stocking hard-to-find throws, beads and novelty MoonPie flavors, making the shop a regular stop for parade-goers stocking up before Mardi Gras season gets underway. Downtown Mobile’s Carnival retail district fills with similar bustle each season, but Toomey’s has distinguished itself by carrying items that casual stores do not, from specialized beads to the newest MoonPie varieties. For marching societies and family groups preparing for parade season, the shop functions as a supply depot as much as a candy store.
Owner Stephen Toomey represents a family name that has become intertwined with Mobile’s Carnival retail trade, and the shop’s approach reflects the seasonal rhythm of the city itself: quiet in the summer heat, building steadily through fall and winter, and swamped in the weeks before the parades begin. The annual flavor announcement fits that rhythm, giving regulars something to look forward to as Carnival approaches and giving the shop a signature moment in the retail calendar.
The mint flavor’s rapid sell-out suggests the specialty program has achieved what any retailer hopes for: customers who arrive asking for the new item by name. That kind of demand allows the shop to plan future releases with confidence, and it explains why other local retailers have followed suit in seeking out unusual MoonPie varieties in recent years. What began as a novelty has become a competitive category within Mobile’s Carnival market.
MoonPies and the economics of Mardi Gras
The MoonPie trade is a small but meaningful slice of the economic activity that Carnival generates in Mobile each year. Parade season draws thousands of visitors downtown, fills hotels and restaurants, and drives a retail boom in throws, costumes and party supplies that sustains specialty shops through the year’s lean months. For retailers like Toomey’s, the weeks before Fat Tuesday represent the culmination of the business year, and the assortment on the shelves, from classic beads to the season’s new MoonPie flavor, is the product of months of preparation.
The treat itself has its own American origin story, born in the South as a lunchbox snack and elevated along the Gulf Coast into a cultural icon. Its durability made it a natural throw, its affordability made it a natural bulk buy, and its sweetness made it a natural favorite. By the time specialty flavors entered the picture, the MoonPie’s place in Mobile’s Carnival was secure, and each new variety simply extends the tradition rather than replacing it.
Shoppers looking for the mint version in 2010 will need to move quickly if the initial demand is any guide, and the shop’s history suggests that missing the first shipment means waiting on a restock. The traditional flavors remain readily available by the box and case, which means parade-goers can still lay in their supplies for the season while they hunt the novelty item. As Carnival season builds toward its climax, the mint MoonPie stands as 2010’s small contribution to a tradition that Mobile has celebrated in its own fashion for longer than any living resident can remember.
From snack cake to Carnival icon
The MoonPie’s journey to Mardi Gras fame is a story of the Gulf South’s ability to adopt an everyday product and make it its own. Created in the early twentieth century by a Chattanooga bakery, the round sandwich of marshmallow between graham cookies, coated in chocolate or flavored shell, was marketed as a filling lunch counter treat for working people. Its spread across the South was rapid, and along the Gulf Coast it found a second identity: the throw that generations of Mobile parade-goers would come to expect from passing floats.
Parade traditions in Mobile predate the MoonPie by a couple of centuries, of course. Mobile’s Carnival celebration traces its organized beginnings to the early 1700s, making it older than the more famous New Orleans iteration, and the city’s mystic societies have handed down their customs through generations. Into that established culture, the MoonPie arrived in the twentieth century and slotted itself neatly into the relationship between float riders and the crowds along the route. Its heft gives a throw a satisfying arc, its wrapper protects it through the flight, and its price allows societies to buy it by the gross.
The treat’s popularity along the parade routes eventually worked its way backward into the retail trade. Shops near the parade routes began stocking MoonPies by the case in the weeks before the season, and brands like the one Toomey’s carries became inseparable from Carnival shopping. What a family buys to hand out from a float or a ladder chair, it turns out, is the same candy the family buys to eat at home, which gives the product a dual market every season.
Why novelty flavors took hold
The specialty flavor phenomenon reflects a broader truth about Carnival culture: it rewards the new without ever discarding the old. Each year brings new bead designs, new theme reveals from the mystic societies and new merchandise, all layered on top of traditions that have run for generations. A new MoonPie flavor fits that pattern exactly, offering regulars a fresh talking point while the banana and chocolate standards continue to sell steadily beside it.
Retailers have learned that seasonal novelty draws traffic that simple shelf stocking does not. A shopper who hears that a new flavor has arrived has a reason to come to the shop rather than grabbing throws at a big-box store, and once inside, that shopper buys the rest of the season’s needs as well. The mint release that sold out shortly after its debut demonstrates the effect: the flavor itself is a modest product, but the announcement of it pulls customers through the door at the height of the pre-season shopping window.
The pattern also mirrors what has happened with the MoonPie brand nationally in recent years, as the century-old snack has enjoyed waves of nostalgia-driven popularity beyond the Gulf South. Mobile’s specialty flavor tradition runs ahead of that curve, driven by the concentrated demand of a city that consumes more MoonPies per capita during Carnival season than anywhere else. Local shops have the advantage of knowing their customers, and their customers know exactly what a new flavor means: Carnival is getting close.
For 2010, that means mint, and for the shoppers at Toomey’s Mardi Gras, the question that follows every annual release is already forming: what flavor comes next year. The answer will not be known until the next season’s shipments arrive, but the tradition of asking has itself become part of how Mobile counts down to Mardi Gras.