Tag: Candy

REVIEW: Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups

Erin 5 Comments

General Mills is rebranding its fruit snacks to suit the modern era of lunchbox-toting kids and teens, but in the case of these Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups, it feels like it went with such a ’90s vibe that it’s targeting the parents and not the offspring. This pack leans entirely on a “weird green guys from outer space” theme that I can’t imagine resonating with today’s kids. But what do I know? The packaging is metallic, and I’ll be damned if weird alien cartoons and shiny things don’t intrigue me.

The pack includes two flavors, Mystery and Solar Melon. I was briefly disappointed that half of these were melon because it gives you fewer chances to guess the mystery flavor. If you’re not familiar with Fruit Roll-Ups, I would describe the flavor of all of them as “This is definitely a Fruit Roll-Up,” but if you can tell the difference between a berry one and whatever the Tie-Dye is, you’re a better person than me. Fruit Roll-Ups are a snack to be eaten as quickly as possible because if they’re fresh, they’re so sticky that you can barely get the plastic off before they collapse in your hand. Definitely do not put them on a plate to photograph like I did. The time from thinking you might give it a taste test to the time you’ve determined that you’d better just shove it all in your mouth before you never get it unstuck from you again is about 8 seconds.

Trying the Mystery flavor, I couldn’t get beyond that it just tasted like I expected a Fruit Roll-Up to taste. Delicious, but overall…normal. Maybe this whole alien theme was a ruse? Maybe space tastes like Fruit Roll-Ups? I didn’t have a clue. Luckily part of this rebranding is a focus on trying to interact beyond the eating of the snack, so General Mills wants you to visit its website, where you can vote on what the flavor is.

Thank Area 51, we have some parameters!

Faced with the choices of Cosmic Citrus Swirl, Stellar Strawberry Peach, Galactic Grape, and Mango Martian, things started to make sense, and I felt pretty confident choosing Strawberry Peach. The strawberry is the classic and dominant flavor, but there’s a little more there, and it will remind you of Peach Rings.

To its credit, the unmysterious Solar Melon is a perfect shade of alien-green and a welcome addition to the box. It manages to taste like a blend of fruits with a melon focus but not in an overly artificial way like many watermelon candies.

The sheets are printed with tongue tattoos in various alien, UFO, and space designs. Because eating a Fruit Roll-Up inherently involves playing with your food, I went ahead and applied a UFO-XING sign to my tongue. It worked like a charm, and by that I mean it left my tongue with an unintelligible giant blue blob on it. You can thank me later for not including that photo. It might not be the most original attempt at a mystery flavor, but eating these is a fun and tasty way to spend two minutes, and who knows, you might win a galactic fanny pack before you’re beamed back up to the mothership.

Purchased Price: $2.29
Size: 10-count box of 0.5 oz rolls
Purchased at: Mariano’s
Rating: 8 out of 10 (Mystery Flavor), 7 out of 10 (Solar Melon)
Nutrition Facts: (1 roll) 50 calories, 1 gram of total fat, 0.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 50 milligrams of sodium, 12 grams of total carbohydrates, 7 grams of sugar (including 7 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Swedish Fish Blue Raspberry Lemonade

Mark 3 Comments

What are they?

We just got Sour Patch Kids Lemonade Fest, and one of the flavors, blue raspberry lemonade, is spotlighted in Swedish Fish, the Kids’ confectionary cousin.

How are they?

Of the four flavors in the Sour Patch Kids Lemonade Fest, I’m not sure why blue raspberry lemonade got the Swedish Fish treatment. In the SPK mix, I thought it didn’t have a strong flavor, but at least it was sour, so it evoked lemonade.

Here, though, it really doesn’t taste like anything. It’s just sweet. I can maybe taste lemon if I squint. But I’m not going to squint because there’s no tartness to make my eyes do funny things.

In my junk food drawer, I have a bag of red, white, and blue Swedish Fish Mini, which includes both blue raspberry (blue) and lemon (white). Each of those has a more discernible flavor. But for some reason, the flavors just get diluted when they’re mixed together.

And there’s another thing: I think these would work better in the mini format. The full size is just too big, and it’s not worth chewing that much for a mediocre flavor.

Anything else you need to know?

Sometimes if you eat too many Sour Patch Kids, your mouth starts to hurt. So at least that’s one thing these Fish have going for them that the SPK mix doesn’t: they won’t hurt your mouth.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, Swedish Fish Blue Raspberry Lemonade are a forgettable candy that doesn’t evoke either blue raspberries or lemonade.

Purchased Price: $2.75
Size: 8.04 oz bag
Purchased at: Dollar General
Rating: 4 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (5 pieces) 110 calories, 0 grams of fat, 15 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 23 grams of sugar (including 23 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Sour Patch Kids Lemonade Fest

Mark

Since Sour Patch Kids are famously “Sour. Sweet. Gone,” it only makes sense there would be an entire pack devoted to lemonade, that spectacular drink that perfectly balances sour and sweet. (Seriously, I think we take lemonade for granted.)

Sour Patch Kids Lemonade Fest consists of four lemonade flavors:

  • Strawberry lemonade (pink)
  • Blue raspberry lemonade (blue)
  • Lemonade (yellow)
  • Cherry lime lemonade (red)

Strawberry lemonade has a lovely fake strawberry flavor. Look, this is a candy, so I don’t care if it tastes fake. It tastes just as I hoped it would! I’m not sure if I can detect lemon per se, but it’s hard to notice something that’s known for being sour in a candy that’s already sour.

Blue raspberry lemonade is good, but I’m not sure I would guess it was raspberry in a blind taste test. It’s more generically sweet and sour.

I think plain lemonade is the sourest of the bunch. It’s just regular lemon, but sometimes you just need the simple classics, and I’m glad it’s in the mix.

Cherry lime lemonade is fascinating. It has a hint of bitterness like you would get from actual limes. Whatever cherry is in there takes a backseat to the lime. This is the closest to something you would find in nature.

Honestly, if I were just mindlessly eating these, I think the cherry lime flavor is the only one I would notice is different from the others. If I eat all four at once, it’s very sour, but no flavor sticks out. Even though they are all similar, I think I like these four flavors more than I like most Sour Patch Kids mixes!

While many candy mixes have fan favorites, I don’t think there’s one flavor I look forward to more than the others in this case. I might have favorite Starbursts, favorite movies, or favorite children*, but I don’t have a favorite of the Sour Patch Kids Lemonade Fest mix.

*Note: I don’t actually have children. Which means I get to keep these all to myself!

Purchased Price: $2.75
Size: 8.02 oz bag
Rating: 8 out of 10
Purchased at: Dollar General
Nutrition Facts: (12 pieces) 110 calories, 0 grams of fat, 25 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 23 grams of sugar (including 23 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Limited Edition Sprite Tic Tac

Jenna 6 Comments

What is it?

Tic Tacs, the diminutive mints, took its first sip of the soda world with a 2020 Coca-Cola flavor. It must have worked because here I am now in 2023 talking about the new Sprite Tac Tacs. Two of the great small pleasures in my life are Tics Tacs and Sprite, but I would never have thought to combine them, so I was glad that someone did. Initially, anyway.

How is it?

The buttery yellow color of these Tic Tacs didn’t get them off to the best start for me. I don’t think I’m alone in immediately associating Sprite with its iconic dark green bottle. While I’m sure this lighter, brighter shade was meant to allude to the citrus flavor (and it probably also didn’t hurt to distinguish these from one of Tic Tac’s most famous varieties, Wintergreen), I found the hue too banana-y to bode well.

The taste did start pretty decent, sweet and lemon-lime-y. Sure, there was a bit of an acidic aftertaste, but the main notes were crisp enough that I was able to mostly ignore it. But since a Tic Tac’s sweetness comes from its smooth outer coating, you’re ultimately going to be sucking on it long enough to dissolve that (about a minute, in my experience) or just biting through it directly. Either method reveals the coarser, more powdery inside, which here is quite sour, and chemical-tasting enough that I’d call it actively unpleasant.

Anything else you need to know?

I get that sourness is theoretically appropriate for a citrus-based flavor, but these just don’t remind me at all of Sprite, a soda I define more by its fizziness and mild sweetness than by any resemblance to the harshness of an actual lemon or lime.

Conclusion:

When I’m going for a Tic Tac, I typically want either to feel refreshed or to get a little burst of tastiness. This flavor doesn’t provide either of those things, so I can confidently say that I won’t be purchasing it again, and I’d even go as far as to state that I hope these lemony Tic Tacs are out of the limelight entirely soon.

Purchased Price: $1.59
Size: 1 oz
Purchased at: Wawa
Rating: 4 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 mint) 0 calories, 0 grams of total fat, 0 milligrams of sodium, 0 grams of total carbohydrates, and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Limited Edition Churro Kit Kat

Brandon

It’s always the summer of something now. Last year was the Summer of Street Corn, if I remember correctly. I think we had the Summer of Matcha the summer before that. Watermelon also had its own summer at some point recently, though you could argue that EVERY summer is the Summer of Watermelon.

My point being George Costanza was way ahead of this trend when he declared 1997 “The Summer of George.” Wait, that wasn’t my point. My point is maybe 2023 will be the Summer of Churro.

Ben & Jerry’s recently brought Churray for Churros to store shelves, and now Kit Kat is following suit with its take on the cinnamony-sugary fried-dough classic. Associate Kit Kat Brand Manager Alex Herzog recently told Food & Wine magazine, “We hope that every bite of the buttery, churro flavor and familiar crispy crunch of our wafers unlocks memories of the delightful experience of enjoying freshly baked churros from the boardwalk stand, amusement park, or the local fair.”

This is a pretty big goal from a candy bar, even one as renowned as the Kit Kat. (Also, full disclosure — I’ve never had a churro at any of these places. A funnel cake, sure, but not a Churro. Note to self: pitch Funnel Cake Kit Kat to Alex Herzog.) So did the R&D geniuses manage to evoke state fairs, amusement parks, or trips to the boardwalk?

I mean… no. It’s an okay candy bar, but those are lofty aspirations.

For starters, I didn’t really get anything that could be construed as “buttery” with this bar. At first taste, you get the familiar waxy coating of a Kit Kat, only it’s a little more vanilla-ish, or maybe white chocolatey than the standard chocolate shell. After a few chews, I got a very mild cinnamon flourish, but it’s gone just as quickly as it appeared.

And really, that’s the biggest miss of this bar; had they gone heavy with the cinnamon, it might’ve really been something special. Instead, it’s very much an “eh, if you’re a Kit Kat aficionado, you’ll wanna try, but temper your expectations,” or if you’re only “a casual Kit Katarian” (just made that up, but we’re going with it) and you’re selective about your candy intake for health and wellness purposes, I probably wouldn’t bother. The 220 calories here would be better spent on an actual part of a churro or a few bites from a funnel cake.

Regardless, I am excited to usher in the Summer of Churro. I wonder what Pringles has planned?

Purchased Price: $1.32
Size: 1.5 oz bar
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 6 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 package) 220 calories, 12 grams of fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 7 grams of saturated fat, 0 mg of cholesterol, 30 milligrams of sodium, 27 grams of total carbohydrates, 20 gram of total sugars, 0 grams of fiber, and 2 grams of protein.