Attention Kinder Surprise-Deprived Americans (Including Mark Steyn): There's Now a "Safer" (and Legal) Alternative

As far as I know, Canadian children are not dropping dead due to accidentally ingesting the "surprise" in a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg (the risk of such being the reason why Mark Steyn, for one, was not allowed to "smuggle" this "contraband" into the U.S.). However, while the Kinder version of the treat remains verboten, Americans can now purchase a "safer" knock off:

About a  week ago, Gass unrolled Choco Treasure, a Kinder-inspired chocolate egg with a toy inside. This is a big deal, because this type of  product hasn’t been legal in this country since 1938, when the Food and Drug Administration passed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits any “non-nutritive component” (for example, a toy) from being embedded in a confectionary product, as the Foodbeast reported.

(Incidentally, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to smuggle them in. According to Canada’s  National Post, more than 60,000 Kinder eggs have been seized at the U.S. border annually. Penalties can zoom up to $2,500 per egg.) 

What’s more, Kinder Surprise eggs, which are manufactured by an Italian company called Ferrero, aren’t safe for kids under 3 years old. The product is in clear violation of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission requirement, which states that candy-with-ensconced-toys must be safe for kids of all ages. 

But none of that deterred Gass. It just motivated him to figure out a way to legalize the contraband. 

“This is the biggest kids candy in the world, and we think it tastes great. It’s fun, and we spent quite a bit of time to make it safer and also as much fun as the original,” Gass told ABC News, adding that he worked with the FDA and a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission certified lab to make sure the product was safe for children of all ages. To wit: Submerged inside each egg is a capsule that separates the two halves of the chocolate. The capsule also has ridges around the side, so even a young child can tell there’s something there...

An entire bureaucracy geared up to ensure that an already safe product conforms to a silly bureaucratic stricture dating from before WW2: If that does not "encapsulate" everything that's wrong with America today, I don't know what does.