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But Nestlé’s executives were satisfied that they’d tested the candy sufficiently, and they argued that the Consumer Product Safety Commission had signed off on it. They thought their disagreement with the FDA was a minor technical point, nothing that would stop the rollout of Nestlé Magic. They signed a deal with Whetstone Candy, a family-run manufacturing company based in Florida, to set up an assembly line for the new chocolates. The deal called for Nestlé to spend up to $6 million to construct a new building at the facility in Florida, and Whetstone hired as many as 125 employees to operate new machines to turn out the chocolate balls.

Nestlé began selling the candy in July 1997, sending marketing material to retailers with the tagline “The power of Nestlé. The excitement of Disney.” The product was an immediate success, moving swiftly off the shelves. The Disney tie-in was sure to be a winner. The toys inside the candy were based on the hugely popular animated film The Lion King and included such characters as Simba the lion and his sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa. There were also figurines of other characters from great Disney films: Cruella de Vil from The 101 Dalmatians, the genie from Aladdin, and more.* Nestlé also knew that children four to twelve years old have an astonishing amount of purchasing power in the economy. The company calculated that parents of children in that age group spent about $3 billion every year. The Nestlé team predicted that Magic would soon be generating $1 billion in annual sales. “There was an obsession with Magic,” recalls one person who was involved. The chocolate pros knew how powerful the new rollout could be: “Whoever gets the toy-chocolate combination right, they’ve got the holy grail.”

But almost immediately, Nestlé came under a wave of assault from critics across the country. Complaints about the candy with a toy inside were being heard at federal agencies, on Capitol Hill, and in the offices of consumer groups. Even the Centers for Disease Control and the state attorneys general in Minnesota and Connecticut registered alarm. To Nestlé’s embattled executives, it looked like a coordinated attack. But they weren’t sure where it was coming from. In a 1997 memo stamped “Confidential,” a top officer at Nestlé summed up the few facts the company had: “We are aware that an individual (or individuals) are attempting to create questions about the safety of Nestlé Magic (i.e., that its marketing is illegal and/or presents a choking hazard for young children).”

Nestlé and its consultants decided to winnow down the list of potential suspects in the attacks, and consider the evidence before them. There were complaints about children who had choked, but Nestlé’s team couldn’t identify a single actual child who’d been harmed by the product. Science-minded Nestlé executives spent an inordinate amount of time examining and reexamining the product. They inserted the little plastic toys every which way into a plastic cylinder known as a “choke tube”—a device designed to mimic the opening of a small child’s throat. If any object fits entirely within the cylinder, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission considers it a potential choking hazard for kids. None of the Disney toys fit inside the choke tube, although the little Timon figure caused some worry. Still, Nestlé had designed the figurine to have overly large feet—feet that conveniently poked just over the lip of the choke tube. Nestlé concluded that its product was safe. Also, it still couldn’t find any kids who had been harmed.

To the veteran crisis experts at Nichols Dezenhall, the fact that no children had actually choked suggested that the campaign against Magic wasn’t prompted by one group often behind such publicity: trial lawyers. After all, if trial lawyers planned to sue for huge damages, they’d need plaintiffs. Without any actual children in evidence, that wasn’t happening. There was only one other possibility: the attack