Sen-Sen was discontinued in 2013. The little black liquorice squares — sold from the 1890s as a "breath perfume", decades before anyone called it a breath mint — were made by F&F Foods until production ended, and nobody has revived them.
A hundred years on the same machine
Sen-Sen started at the T. B. Dunn Company, a perfume manufacturer in Rochester, New York, which is exactly the origin the taste suggests. The remarkable part is the continuity: the mints were reportedly produced on the same equipment for over a century. What ended them was not a bankruptcy or an acquisition, just competition — by 2013 they had fallen away against Breath Savers and Tic Tacs, and the line was stopped. Stock lingered in wholesalers for a while after that, which is why you will find people who remember buying them later.
What to buy instead
The substitution that sellers who stocked Sen-Sen actually recommend is Choward's Scented Gum: same violet-and-perfume register, in chewable form, made by C. Howard and still in production. It is the closest thing to the Sen-Sen experience that anyone still makes, and we stock it.
Our own suggestion, if it was the little pressed square you miss rather than the chew, is Choward's Violet mints — a soft, floral, faintly perfumed pastille rather than a sharp peppermint, from the same maker and the same 1930s tradition. That one is our call, not a seller consensus, and we would rather label it as such.
For the liquorice side of Sen-Sen rather than the floral side, the strong tins on this page — Altoids in particular — are a blunter but closer match on intensity.
