This being summer, tours abound, criss-crossing the country to promote this or that product. But one that's been out there many long months, since February, is the Mentos Absurdly Fresh Tour, with the fleet of sky-blue branded Saturn Sky convertible sports.

The gimmick is to show up at fairs and festivals with the cars, which attracts girls, which in turn attracts guys, which in turn creates an opportunity to hand out the product. Over nine months, through October, the tour will visit 56 cities.

Then the Mentos folks decided to kick it up a bit. At a recent stop in Cincinnati, just north of parent company Perfetti Van Melle’s Erlanger, Ky., U.S. headquarters, the tour set about to get itself entered into the Guinness World Records book by hosting a challenge to get the largest number of people to create Mentos Geysers. A Mentos Geyser is what happens when a candy is dropped into a two-liter bottle of soda. The candy reacts with the soda to set off a geyser of sorts.

That day, in late May, 504 people gathered at Cincinnati’s Fountain Square to set the record for "Most Mentos and Soda Fountains."

"We applied to [Guinness], they approved it, and then we flew in a judicator over from London, who was there to make sure everything was legit," says Elizabeth Cannon, brand manager for Mentos.

"He was able to count up the results quickly. He got up on stage and announced the record, then gave a certificate to our vice president."

Anytime someone sets a Guinness record, the local media can be expected to jump on it, especially if it's a slow news day, and it worked for the Mentos challenge, making it the ideal sort of alternative media event.

"The media really embraced it," Cannon says. "Reports are still coming in, but we’re seeing a lot of stories about it all over the national media. It’s been great."

With still months to go on for the tour, the temptation looms to rebreak the record, but Cannon says the company has no immediate plans to do so. "But you never know," she says.