Quite a lot of sweets etc actually fail in the market, the big boys will have the marketing power to generally force a product but the smaller ones can and did fail a lot as we'd always find that kids are fickle and one day they'd strip your shelves bare of a product and the next day it would of lost its cool factor and when it stopped selling the warehouse would stop stocking it and then we'd read it'd been stopped in a trade journal.
So quite often they were made for the market to follow a fad and as such small batches may of been made