ZOMG, Candy!

These Meiji Pupurun Grape Gummis came in my generous free sample box from Tsunami.hk. They came in a conveniently resealable bag with a cute mascot and an intriguing rendering of the gummi’s cross-section.

Each gummi was the size of a gum drop but with a rounder domed shape. They had a stiff outer shell that was thickest at the top. The center was a softer gummi that was just shy of an oozy goo in texture.

They tasted sweet and juicy with a nice floral flavor that I thought was more strawberry than grape. The finish, however, had a noticeable grape taste that tasted quite genuine and was not at all medicinal.

While there was nothing revolutionary about the flavor of the gummis, I absolutely loved the texture. The solid flavor combined with their unique texture earned these an OM.

I got these Japanese peach gummis in my generous free sample box from Tsunami.hk. They’re solid proof that the Japanese are darn good at making gummis (along with creepy robots).

The gummis came in a resealable bag with a luscious white peach and a blue um… condom-like button promising 2600 mg of… something. The gummis themselves were an opaque mustard yellow and shaped like idealized Asian cartoon peaches.

I loved their soft, bouncy texture. It was a pleasure to feel them sproinging against my teeth. For me, that’s the ideal gummi texture.

They tasted sweet and floral, with a hint of citrus flavor. If I hadn’t known that they were supposed to be peach, I would have guessed that they were orange or fruit punch.

Either way, the flavor was refreshing and delicious. I liked that the sweetness wasn’t overpowering or artificial tasting. It was just sweet enough.

A great combination of flavor and texture earns these guys an OMG. My bag disappeared far too quickly.

These gummi butterflies from Albanese are a relatively new addition to the bulk bins of my local Wegmans. They’re beautifully translucent and look like those gel window sticker things.

They came in six colors/flavors and were generously sized. Tip to tip, I’d say the wingspan was about the length of my index finger.

The texture was a joy. They were soft with the perfect balance of stiffness and bounce, so they were easy to tear with my teeth. They were also smooth and had a pleasant mouthfeel when I had the patience to let them melt in my mouth.

Dark red was cherry. It tasted deeply dark with nicely complex red fruit notes.

Lime green was supposed to be apple. I found it sweet with a vague tinge of citrus.

Orange was one of my favorites. It was vibrantly sweet and citrusy. A nice orange zestiness develops across the gummi’s flavor profile and shines through.

Based on just taste, I couldn’t figure out what flavor aqua was. Based on the website, I think it’s supposed to be blue raspberry. It was my least favorite because it carried an inexplicable plasticky, petrol note.

I thought pink was strawberry, but the website says that it’s watermelon. I thought it had a nicely floral finish with strawberry highlights.

Finally, purple was grape. It was well-balanced and managed to avoid that medicinal grape nastiness.

With the exception of the aqua, I found these to be a pleasure to play with and eat (I was enjoying biting them in half and making hybrid butterflies). Aqua gets a –; the rest gets OMs.

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.

Albanese makes my favorite gummi bears, so I was quite excited to see some of their chocolate-covered gummi bears turn up in my NCA pre-trade show goodie bag.

Albanese gave out their samples in hand-packaged candy dime bags, so I have no idea what the commercial packaging looks like. My guess is that they’re primarily a bulk bin treat, so they may not have commercial packaging.

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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.

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Wonka’s Squishy Sploshberries Gummies are yet another new addition to Wonka’s Edible Garden of gummies. These, too, were in my free 16 lb bag of Sweets and Snacks Expo preview goodies, courtesy of the NCA.

I thought they were just berry-flavored gummies with foamy bottoms, until I tried one and discovered that they were berry-flavored gummies with foamy bottoms and liquid goo inside!

I do believe that liquid goo is the “splosh” component of the name. Though it could also be the “squish”, I suppose.

The Squishy Sploshberries came in raspberry, goji berry, cloud berry (apparently that’s a real thing), and blueberry flavors.

The gummies were all varying shades of a honey/amber color with a white foam gummi bottom and a gooey liquid center.

The foam gummi sort of had the texture of marshmallows and just tasted lightly sweet and fruity, while the inner liquid was thick, a bit grainy, and powerfully sweet and fruity.

Cloud Berry, the flower-shaped one, was the lightest colored of the bunch and was more yellow than orange.

I have no idea what cloud berries are supposed to taste like, but Wonka’s gummi version of it was great! It tasted like sweet white grapes, what some candy makers call muscat flavored.

Goji berry was strawberry-like in shape. While it tasted somewhat like strawberry candies, I also got some seediness to that I usually associate with raspberry candies.

The actual raspberry gummi took that seediness and gave it more depth. This one tasted more deeply of raspberry than the strawberry did and was covered in lots of bumps to look like the bottom of a real raspberry.

Blueberry looked like a weird leaf or a bunch of berries on a vine. I was blown away by how well Wonka captured the distinct flavor of blueberries – the flavor is spot on. And delicious!

I really enjoyed the Squishy Sploshberries. They were uniquely flavored, with flavors that were powerful and well done, and I loved the added flavor injection and textural contrast of the inner goo. An OM.

Nestle’s been doing a great job of breathing new life into their Wonka lineup. While I haven’t loved everything that they’ve rolled out, I do love the creativity and imagination that’s gone into their new products.

I’m devoting this week’s reviews to the bunch of new Wonka products that I got in my NCA goody bag (sadly, I’m not heading to the Sweets and Snacks Expo [formally the All Candy Expo] tomorrow. Because I’m in Italy for a cognitive science conference. I know; my life is so hard).

These Whipped Wingers Gummies are “from Wonka’s Edible Garden,” which is a cute thematic (and psychedelic) tie-in for their new gummies. They come in four shapes – wasp, butterfly, dragonfly, and ladybug – and four flavors – pineapple, orange, watermelon, and tropical punch.

The shapes and flavors are not linked. That is, all shapes come in all flavors, and vice-versa. The gummy shapes were well-defined, with sharp etchings.

All of these gummies had a soft, creamy texture, which I take to be the whipped component. Unlike most other gummies, they were totally opaque.

Pineapple was yellow, mellow, and sweet. I wouldn’t have guessed that it was pineapple flavored, as it was rather generically sweet and fruity.

Orange was orange and had muted citrus notes. Watermelon tasted round and floral with a solid artificial watermelon candy flavor and a seedy, fruity finish.

Tropical punch doesn’t taste very punchy to me. Instead, I get the red fruitiness of strawberry, with maybe a little grape in there.

The Whipped Wingers were too lightly flavored for me. While I appreciated the idea and effort, I found them to be rather meh flavorwise because that added creaminess so diluted the fruitiness. An O.

Every time I visit my boyfriend’s Boston home, I make ask him to take me to Trader Joe’s, as they always have an assortment of neat packaged foods. The last time I went, I picked up a bunch of new candy loot, and their Citrus Gum Drops are first up to be reviewed.

The gum drops came in a cheerful nature-themed bag that invoked eco-friendly associations. I don’t think the candies are as such, as the first ingredient is corn syrup, but I still appreciated the aesthetic.

I love citrus fruits and citrus-flavored candies, so I had high expectations for these gum drops. They come in tangerine, pink grapefruit, lemon, and key lime.

Each gum drop was about the size of the first joint of my pinky finger. They were all covered in sweet granulated sugar and had sticky-soft chews. That is, they yielded immediately upon being bitten into but still stuck to my teeth, just a tad.

Tangerine was expectedly orange colored. Its actual orange flavor, however, was unexpectedly dark. It tasted deeply of orange oil and lacked the bright citrus flavor that most orange gummi candies have.

Pink grapefruit was a purplish-pink. It tasted sweet at first bite before the grapefruit acid flavor came out. It’s not the best grapefruit gummi I’ve had, but it was a solid effort.

Lemon was yellow and sweet with no tartness. It tasted of lemon zest and had a light edge of bitter pith, which brought a wonderful complexity.

Finally, the white key lime was my favorite (to eat, at least. Its lack of color threw off the color balance of the photo!). But it perfectly encapsulated the flavor of fresh limes. It tasted extremely zesty and limey and had a bitter undertone that set off the whole thing quite nicely.

Trader Joe’s Citrus Gum Drops are a great flavor mix and a cut above “normal” gum drops. Better yet, the price point is awesome – $1.99 for an 8 oz bag. An OM.

The candy blogger in me is hyper-attuned to candy packaging that indicates that its contents are a new product. The pseudo-grammar nazi in me is hyper-attuned to instances of annoyingly unnecessary abbreviations. Thus, Life Savers* Sweet Strings N Sour Rings doubly caught my eye.

Actually, that’s only sort of true. There’s a lot going on on the front of this bag! So I didn’t notice the “New” splotch and the irksome “N” until I was photographing it.

Blatantly obvious statement of the day: the hook with these guys is that there are two types of gummies. The strings are sweet – raspberry and cherry to be precise – while the rings are sour – fruit punch and green apple.

I was a little disappointed that the strings were straight sticks instead of the jaunty S curves depicted on the bag. Luckily, my disappointment was tempered by the discovery of a single mutant ring that was doubly flavored – a chimera, if you will.

The strings were on the softer side of the gummi texture spectrum, with no bounce and a pretty yielding give. They were coated with sweet sugar.

Cherry (the darker red) was mellow and floral with a plasticky/artificial undertone, while raspberry was very sweet with a seedier, less floral taste than that of the cherry.

The rings had a bouncier chew to them. They were covered in sour sugar that was actually noticeably sour. Hooray!

After the sourness dissipated, green apple mellowed out into a round sweetness. Fruit punch, while blue, tasted like a red fruit punch. Hawaiian, to be exact.

The only flavor that I really actively enjoyed was the sour fruit punch. The rest were fine in terms of flavor strength, but the individual flavors weren’t my personal favorites, so the bag, which I did eventually finish, gets an O.

*Life Savers is officially two words, but even Amazon thinks that it’s one word!