A Tasty History of Edible Underwear

One night in the early 1970s, while consuming wine and smoking marijuana, David Sanderson came up with an idea. He remembered that his older brother had an expression for when David was annoying him: “Eat my shorts.”

What if, Sanderson wondered, people really could eat their own shorts?

He related the idea to his partner, Lee Brady. As a possible result of that same marijuana consumption, Brady believed it was a fantastic idea. And while many people would have been content to let it rest once sobriety settled in, Sanderson and Brady were convinced that an edible undergarment was a concept worth pursuing. They even had the perfect name for their invention: Candypants.

The novelty gift item briefly took the country by storm. Bowled over by the concept of edible underwear, consumers bought Candypants with such fervor that the factory had trouble keeping up with demand. The business grossed $150,000 a month. Sanderson and Brady appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Everyone, it seemed, had a cheeky comment to make about Candypants.

While its inventors profited from the craze, they had to navigate some popular misconceptions. Originally, edible underwear was never intended to be sold in adult novelty stores. They really weren’t meant to be worn, either. Nor were they supposed to be eaten. Candypants were a risqué gag item that cracked a conservative market by presenting as an innocuous novelty. But some powerful figures involved in the darker corners of the adult entertainment industry had other plans for Sanderson and Brady's novel invention.

Sanderson and Brady were a couple in their early 20s living in Chicago when the idea for Candypants blossomed. The two had an entrepreneurial bent, importing Tibetan artwork and even organizing a theater troop, the Puck Players, to perform in Chicago-area elementary schools. These earnest performances were met with some measure of revolt, as Sanderson recalled in a 2015 interview with KCRW. The students, he said, were fond of replacing the P on their truck with an F.

The Candypants venture began with the men inviting friends over to their apartment and using garbage bags to take measurements for underwear sizes. (Presumably, it was easier to cut a pattern into the bags than it would have been a bolt of fabric.) Once they had sizing for both men's and women's options, the two pondered how to make the product something that could actually be consumed. While visiting a baking factory on a scouting trip, they noticed that the company had a bag of yeast that could be thrown in a vat. The bag was biodegradable and edible. Maybe, they thought, this was the answer.

To find the right kind of edible material, Sanderson and Brady teamed up with Derek McManus, an analytical chemist originally from England. Over a period of months, the three settled on a recipe that consisted of modified food starch, glycerin, inverted sugar, mannitol, lecithin, artificial color, and artificial flavor. All of the ingredients were approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The brief itself would be processed in a sheet, then cut to garment specifications. To bind the sides, they used licorice strips. The partners named their company Cosmorotics, Inc.

Cosmorotics had one immediate problem: When they applied for a patent at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, their design was rejected because the words candy and pants were mutually exclusive. The office had no idea how to conceive of an edible article of clothing. This was successfully appealed, but it paled in comparison to a bigger problem. How could they let people know that Candypants existed?

Fortunately, the pair had a friend who ran a bath and boutique shop and agreed to put Candypants on display. Because the store was close to the University of Indiana, several students picked up a pair on a whim. One of those students happened to be a reporter for the school newspaper who decided to write a story about this peculiar retail item, and the story got picked up by the Associated Press. Virtually overnight, word spread about Candypants.

When the orders began piling up, Cosmorotics opened a factory in Chicago, where a giant machine squeezed out the edible material in two different flavors: wild cherry and banana split. (A third option, hot chocolate, had a foul taste and was said to be brown in color, an unfortunate choice for simulation underwear. It was quickly discontinued.) The underwear, which retailed for $4.95, was packaged in cellophane with a written caution to unwrap it only when it was ready for use. “Candypants may dry out,” the warning read.

By early 1976, Cosmorotics was having trouble keeping up with the demand. With Valentine’s Day looming, lingerie shops, pharmacies, and even motorcycle shops were selling through their inventory. Curiously, Candypants could also be found in major retail chains like Bloomingdale’s and Montgomery Ward—a fact that Sanderson attributed to their conscious attempts to keep Candypants firmly in the territory of a novelty gift item and not presented as a kinky sex accessory in adult bookstores.

“We’re trying for a universal market,” Sanderson told the Los Angeles Times in 1976.

By 1976, Sanderson, Brady, and McManus were selling $150,000 in Candypants every month. Store owners would get calls for high-volume orders. Nunneries bought them in bulk to give away at bingo games. They went to nursing homes and bridal showers.

But as the volume of orders increased, Sanderson and Brady began having trouble sourcing some of the edible ingredients. They would order 9000 pounds of flavoring, and receive just nine pounds.

As it turned out, people in the business of adult novelties had taken notice of Candypants. And they wanted to take a bite out of them.

Sanderson and Brady discovered that the people behind adult bookstores—which, in the 1970s, was a business often connected with organized crime—were irate that Candypants were not being stocked on their shelves. They intended to produce knock-off versions that would compete with Candypants for material and satisfy the demand at sex shops.

Struggling to keep up with orders in the face of competition, Cosmorotics turned to an unlikely ally: Iva Toguri D’Aquino, also known as “Tokyo Rose,” a woman who had once been convicted of treason for broadcasting Japanese propaganda during World War II. (She was pardoned by Gerald Ford after serving three years of a 10-year sentence.)

D’Aquino owned a mercantile exchange in Chicago. She told Sanderson and Brady to connect with a factory in Japan that made rice paper wrappers for candy and medication. The rice paper was edible—and better yet, it was not under the thumb of the mafia. With a new source, Cosmorotics was able to continue churning out Candypants for hungry consumers around the country.

Sanderson and Brady enjoyed their modest fame and literal fortune, buying a mansion in Chicago and installing a disco that played host to parties. They befriended David Bowie, who knew the photographer who had shot ads for Candypants. They expanded the line to include mint and passion fruit flavors, as well as an edible bra they dubbed Teacups. They also released Notables, a stationery package consisting of edible notepad paper and a pen that was caramel-flavored. (The envelopes were not meant for consumption.)

Eventually, the knock-offs began to overshadow the brand identity of Candypants. In the 1980s, the men accepted an offer to purchase the company—made, they said, by a man who paid them in a briefcase full of cash. Sanderson and Brady moved to Florida and eventually married in 2015. They currently have no affiliation with Candypants, which are still being sold on Amazon (in even more flavors).

From one simple night of accidental brainstorming, the men had cultivated an empire. It wasn’t a bad outcome for a product that seemed ill-suited for either of its intended purposes. A 1976 test taste declared Candypants tasted like a rain slicker. Wearing them was not practical, either.

But Sanderson knew it was the package, not the contents, that was the real attraction. In a survey, Cosmorotics found that 85 percent of Candypants buyers never even opened the box.