ZOMG, Candy!

Hey readers! I’m on my last day of pseudo-vacation up in New Hampshire, so check out this post from ex-pat Neil in the meantime. ~Rosa

I had time to kill in a German train station, and I needed some spare change to use the bathroom, so I bought these Haribo Turtles. They set me back 1.90, which seemed reasonable at the time, but in hindsight seems a bit excessive.

Curious about the variety provided, I dumped out all the turtles and counted. My bag contained 4 green/yellow, 7 red/pink, and 13 orange/orange individuals. While much has been written about the distribution of M&M colors, the statistical analysis of Haribo products will need some more data collection before we can do any turtle-tests.  Flipping the turtles onto their backs revealed a lighter section that I expected to be creamy or marshmallow. Nope! Just regular Haribo Gummi.

I found the orange guys to be sour in a bad way at first, like something that had gone “off”, rather than something naturally sour, and not much of any orange fruit taste. Each required lots of chewing, without much flavor payoff.

The red/pink sort were sweeter, again with no discernable flavor, but better overall. The green/yellow endangered population became even more threatened when I found out that they were my clear favorite. The combination of sweet and sour was perfect, exactly what I’d hoped for. A number of citrus flavors really shone through.

These are fun to eat. The filling isn’t as fruity & tasty as the bag promises, but the red turtles are satisfactory and the green/yellow ones are a delight. I’ll give this product an O. May the turtle flavor odds be ever in your favor.

I received these Haribo Nappar Fruit as a gift from a friend who got them from Europe. Instead of one big bag, I got several tiny bags that reminded me of fruit snacks bags.

Haribo is pretty good at putting unintentionally hilarious mascots on its products. Remember Maoam? The Nappar Fruit mascots are just high-fiving, but they look a bit … prophylactic… to me.

The gummies themselves looked like tiny magnifying glasses. The chew was extremely stiff, almost like gnawing on plastic. Their texture reminded me of Jujubes.

They came in yellow, green, and orange. Or vingummi, med, and frugtsmag, as the bag says. Yum!

Yellow was lemon. It had a light zestiness with a bitter twinge of pith under an overall mild citrus fruitiness that reminded me of Sprite.

Green was pear. It wasn’t very sweet and had a seedy undertone.

Orange tasted plasticky for a while before finally giving way to a sweet and mellow tinge of orange.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the extreme stiffness of the chew, but it did make the flavor last. I’ll be lenient and give them an O.

Haribo Fruity-Bussi are the fruity corollary to the Jogi-Bussi that I reviewed on Monday. They were the same mix of gummi, foam, and goo as the Jogi-Bussi, but not yogurt-based. I far preferred these.

The three fruits on this wrapper were orange, raspberry, and pear, though all the gummies were shaped like little round, knobby raspberries/blackberries.

Orange tasted sweetly acidic with an orange tinge. The goo was nice and thick and beautifully oozy. It had a wonderfully zesty sharpness that was quite enjoyable.

Green was pear. It combined the mellowness of Fuji apples with a light peariness.

Red was raspberry. Raspberry is a tricky fruit flavor to nail, but Haribo did a pretty good job. These tasted darkly red with a great berry seediness.

The bland foam bottoms of these contrasted with the fruity, flavorful sweetness of the gummies. Still, the foam wasn’t as objectionable as that of the Jogi-Bussi since the Fruity-Bussis were much more flavorful.

The goos were the best part of these gummies. They tasted of concentrated fruitiness with a great viscosity that let their ooze coat and linger on the tongue. An OMG.

I found these Haribo Jogi-Bussi in Europe. There’s also a Fruity-Bussi version that I’ll review on Wednesday. They’re yogurt gummies with a foam bottom and some sort of goo in the center.

There were four fruits pictured on the wrapper – strawberry, apple, peach, and pear – but I only had two colors of gummi – pink and yellow. I think perhaps the gummi and goo sections were supposed to have separate flavors?

Pink’s gummi portion was on the stiff and chewy side and tasted generically sweet and red. I think it was supposed to be strawberry? The yogurt center had an herbal, grassy tinge to it. I wasn’t able to place the flavor, as it didn’t taste fruit-like to me at all.

I was not a fan of the foam bottom. The squishy styrofoamy texture weirded me out and was totally unpleasant.

Yellow had a rounder, more mellow flavor. It tasted lightly of citrus with some floral notes. I think it was supposed to be peach. The yogurt center was similarly incomprehensible with that herbal tinge.

These centers weren’t oozy enough, and I thought the yogurt centers tasted weird. I also really disliked the texture of the foam bottoms. An O.

Nestle/Wonka did a much better version of the gummi/foam/ooze combination with their Squishy Sploshberries. Also, not to give too much away, but the Fruity-Bussi were better too.

I bought this bag of Haribo Brixx at a dollar store. The same one where I bought Haribo Clown Fish and Pico-Balla. Thankfully, they weren’t as terrible as the others, but they definitely aren’t my favorite Haribo product.

The Brixx are very cute little rectangles with six smaller white rectangles of fondant running through the center. They have a very stiff chew, with no bounce and barely any stickiness.

They come in three colors: yellow, green, and red. All are pretty regularly sized and covered in sugar sand, and all had a light creamy undertone that came from the fondant threads.

I guessed that yellow was pineapple, but Candy Addict says it’s pear. It was mild and sweet, with tinge of sour citrus. The stiff chew made it taste kind of plasticky.

Green was apple. It combined the mellow roundness of Fuji apples with the edge of green Granny Smiths while staying shy of sourness.

Red fell into the trap of generic artificial red candy. It tasted deeply sweet and, well, red!

I wasn’t a big fan of the texture, but I did enjoy the novelty of the fondant addition. An O.

I bought these Haribo gummi clown fish at the dollar store. I’d never seen them before on usual store shelves, and after tasting them, I figured out why.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got really excited when I saw this bag of Haribo Pico-Balla at the dollar store. They looked like my beloved European licorice pencils that have yet to catch on in the U.S. Could it be that they were hiding in the dollar store of the mall all along?

They certainly looked the part – colored fruit licorice wrapped around fondant fillings. The fillings were even extra fancy, with two colors!

Alas, while they were similar to my licorice pencils, they weren’t quite right.

For starters, the texture of the Pico-Balla was a bit too stiff and plasticy. Licorice pencils should have some bite to them, but these guys involved too much gnawing.

As for the flavors, they were weird and just didn’t mesh for me. Turquoise stuck out because its fondant filling was yellow and purple, while the other three had blue and orange.

The turquoise fruit licorice portion tasted like fruit punch, while the sweet fondant had a light anise and minty finish. It was simultaneously sweet and creamy and herbal.

The yellow coating tasted sweet with a light citrus tinge. Green tasted like the yellow, sans the citrus tinge, and maybe had a light apple finish, but maybe I was imagining it? And red just tasted like generic artificial red candy.

The orange and blue fondant fillings tasted of sherbet. I couldn’t pick out a particular flavor; they were just sweet and creamy and fruity.

I’m not sure why, but to me, the fruit licorice texture and flavors were just completely incompatible with the sherbet-y fondant fillings.

In the end, I found the Pico-Balla flavors and textures to be off-putting. They’re not awful, but they are rather blech, so a –.

Haribo Fruity Pasta claims that it’s “extra sour” on the bag, but it’s not. It also claims that it’s “gummi candy”, but it’s not quite what I would consider to be gummi. And for good measure, they didn’t really look like pasta either.

There’s plenty of sour sugar in the bag, on the gummis, and in the gummis’ nooks and crannies, but it was more sweet than sour. As for the gummi part – the texture was neither soft nor squishy. Instead, it was like chewing on stiff plastic, and the little bits that resulted were sticky, dissolved slowly, and got stuck in the nooks and crannies of my teeth.

To me, the “gummis” didn’t look much like pasta. The plate on the bag already looked weird with its super short strands. The actual pieces looked even weirder, like tiny, truncated lasagna noodles.

Red was strawberry – a little floral and a little plasticky, like Twizzlers but fruitier. Yellow was pear, with a mild fruit flavor and a slightly pear-y bite.

Green was apple, but it didn’t taste like green granny smiths. Instead, it really nailed the flavor of a golden delicious apple, especially on the finish.

In summary, I found these to be neither sour nor gummi nor pasta, but they were fruity, and the weird texture was strangely compelling in an off-putting way. I wouldn’t buy them again, but I did slowly work my way through the whole bag over the course of a few months An O.

I’ve often seen bags of Haribo Sour S’ghetti in stores but usually opted for more familiar gummis. I finally took the Sour S’ghetti plunge when they showed up at Aldi for around $1 a bag, a deal that was too good to pass up.

The s’ghetti are ~2 inch gummi noodles covered in granulated sugar. They have a super stiff chew that really gets stuck in your teeth. The noodles come in three flavors: apple, strawberry, and blueberry.

Apple is green, yet tastes more mellow and floral than granny smiths do. It also lacks the sour tang of granny smiths.

The red strawberry is a slightly medicinal red fruit flavor. Because of that, I originally pegged it as cherry, but the bag has pictures of strawberries on it, so strawberry it must be.

Finally, the blue blueberry just tastes of sweetness and fruitiness. There’s a strong finish I can’t quite place – either fruit punch or blue Gatorade?

There’s nothing extraordinary about these gummis. I didn’t mind the stiff texture, though some may be annoyed. The messiness of the granuated sugar coating (it got everywhere) was a bit annoying, but I was more miffed that it was sweet rather than sour. These weren’t nearly sour enough for my taste. In fact, I didn’t find them sour at all!

I give them an O. I probably wouldn’t buy them again, even if they were on sale.

I bought these Haribo TropiFrutti somewhere in Spain. I saw them in lots of shops in Europe, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in the U.S.

The texture of these really sets them apart. They have this weird shell that’s hard to the touch and sort of tough to chew. It reminds me of the crust that forms on chewy candy that’s been left out to dry up. The gummi inside is soft, and when they TropiFrutti are eaten, they textures mix together.

They come in six colors and a variety of shapes – fruit shapes plus toucans and palm trees. We’ll start at the top of the photo and work our way down.

Banana is yellow. I don’t particularly like banana flavored candy. The distillation of fresh banana flavor into artificiality just doesn’t appeal to me. This one tasted of sweetness, plus the scent of bananas. It did not appeal to me.

The dark red toucan also came in the shape of a bunch of grapes, so I thought it was grape. But when I tasted it, it carried a raspberry-like seedy bite. I’d guess that it was raspberry, but there’s a picture of a passionfruit on the wrapper, so maybe it’s passionfruit?

The orange wedge tasted mildly orange with a bitter bite. It was weird and soapy/grassy rather than zesty. Yuck.

The white pineapple tasted just like pineapple, with an authentic core-y bite.

The pink strawberry carries a mild berry flavor. I don’t associate strawberries with tropical-ness, but at least it’s not weird tasting.

Last but not least, the palm tree. I think it was kiwi? It had mild grassy notes and a sweet flavor that I identified as kiwi (though maybe only because there was a kiwi on the bag).

All in all, I’m a little conflicted about what rating to assign this. On the one hand, I didn’t enjoy most of the flavors and disliked the texture. On the other hand, I managed to eat most of the bag, though just a few at a time per sitting over the course of a couple of months.

In the end, they get a –. I decided it was telling that I couldn’t manage to stomach eating more than a few at a time.