Candy Blog

I couple of years ago I found out that Haribo had a Smurfs candy, but it wasn’t sold widely in the United States. I did track them down when I was in Germany, and bought a single one, for half a Euro at a Christmas Market in Schmalkalden (here’s a photo of me buying it). The individual pieces were large, about half an ounce (see photo) and a generic berry flavored jelly candy.

Now that the second Smurfs movie has been released worldwide (and a third planned since the first one has already made a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide) Haribo did decide to release a version to the United States in pouch packaging. I picked this bag up at Cost Plus World Market about a month after the movie came out.

This version has smaller candies in the traditional gelatin-based gummi style. The bag a little more expensive than usual Haribo candies at Cost Plus - not the sticker price, but the fact that the bag holds 4 ounces instead of the usual 5 ounces for products like the Gold Bears or Happy Cola.

The candies are shaped like the Smurfs. They’re predominantly blue with different colors on top. Most are clear on top, to emulate the standard white Smurf Phrygian cap. Papa Smurf has a red hat and Smurfette has blonde (yellow) hair.

The pieces are big, about an inch and half tall.

The blue flavor of the Smurf body is berry. I’d say it might be raspberry and it might be strawberry, it’s hard to tell. It’s jammy and it’s tart and overall, has a good flavor. The colored head coverings are a different flavor though.

Smurfette’s hair is lemon. It’s mild and pleasant, not as intense as the Haribo Gold Bears, but still goes well with the berry blue body.

The standard clear headed Smurf is pineapple, which I love and think goes great with the berry.

Papa Smurf’s red hat is, well, hard to distinguish. If I had to say, maybe it’s raspberry and the body is strawberry ... maybe they’re the same.

The candies are well done, a little monotonous because of the mostly single flavor but the molding and different shapes are pretty good. If you’re keen on Swedish Fish, this might be a fun treat, though they are a gummi, not a jelly candy so they’re not for vegetarians. They’re flat, not dimensional like the Au’some 3 Dees candies that have also come out with licensing agreements with characters from Nintendo, Monopoly and Kung Fu Panda. Maybe the time has passed when I would have been interested in a Smurf themed candy, but for someone who really likes them, and you’re planning on screening the movie, it’d be a fun themed snack.

Related Candies

1. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo - Part 1
2. Haribo Gold Bears from Turkey and Germany
3. Angry Birds Fruit Gummies
4. Life Savers Gummies Spooky Shapes
5. Trolli Gummi Bear-Rings
6. Au’some Easter 3-Dees Gummy
7. Haribo Happy Cola
8. Disney Pixie Perfect Gummies

Maria Sharapova, one of the top tennis players in the world, launched a line of candy last year, called Sugarpova. (She even briefly tried to change her name to Maria Sugarpova for the 2013 US Open, but ended up not participating due to a shoulder injury.) The new candy line is made in Spain by the confectionery company Fini. There are over a dozen different candies in her line, all sugar candies like gummis and chews, with fun names like Flirty, Sassy and Chic.

The logo on the front of each package is a pair of lips. The packaging and candy shapes have little to do with tennis, except for the gumballs. I’ve actually tried these gumballs before in a larger size, but only in the traditional yellow color. (See the original review here.)

I ordered the candy online from an eBay sports equipment store, the bags are priced rather steep at $5.95 for only 5 ounces. That calculates to over $19 per pound, which is pretty absurd for sugar candy that’s not made from special ingredients like all natural flavorings, non-GMO corn syrup or organic sugar.

Sugarpova Sporty Mix Bubble Gum come in five color/flavor combinations: orange, pink, yellow, blue and green. The pieces are about .75 inches across (about half the diameter of the jawbreaker version I tried previously). They’re also available separately, in Pink and standard Tennis Yellow. I chose the mix so that I could try as many flavors as possible.

The gumballs are made with sugar, no artificial sweeteners. One of the colorings is carmine, so they’re not appropriate for vegetarians.

Yellow is lemon-lime and is rather bland for the most part but with an oddly strong zest note to it. There’s a grainy filling inside the ball, but that just seemed sweet to me.

Orange is quite mild, it’s sweet with the only burst of real flavor coming from the sandy filling, in this case, it was tart.

Blue is raspberry and quite nice for a berry flavored gum. The floral notes are a bit perfumey, but it also has a lot longer lasting flavor than some of the others.

Pink was difficult to discern completely, I felt it was a pink lemonade flavor, it was different from the lemon-lime, it was more like a standard lemonade drink mix, a little tangy and less zesty.

Green was watermelon. I didn’t care for this at all, it had the requisite melon and cucumber notes, but was far too sweet overall.

The chew was good, the sugar melts away pretty quickly and the chew is pretty soft and easy to blow bubbles. Eventually, though, after about twenty minutes of chewing, there really is nothing left of the flavor or sweetness and it becomes too stiff for chewing or bubbles.

The Sugarpova Splashy Gummis have nothing to do with tennis. Instead this is just a standard mix of gummis in the shape of sea creatures.

There are three different styles of gummis in the package. One is the standard fruity gummi, one is what I’d call the yogurt style gummi, which is usually opaque and pastel, and the third is the foamy base gummi, which has a bit of marshmallow in it.

The gummi octopus was fun because they were multicolored and each color was a different flavor. So they’re similar to gummi worms. Each piece had three flavors or so, something in a range of lemon, grape, strawberry, raspberry and cherry. It’s all soft with a good texture though the flavor was far more mild than I’m accustomed to with Haribo or Albanese.

The flat swirly fish are what I’d call the yogurt style. There’s a creamy component to the flavor. The pink version was like a strawberry cheesecake flavor. It was sweet and had a creamy note along with a tartness. The floral flavors of the berry were less jammy than some other clear gummis. The green version was similar, milder than a transparent version, with a vague green apple flavor.

The foamy base gummis looked like sharks. This is a popular candy, a lot of different gummi companies make a version of these. This is a very flavorful version, soft and chewy, the marshmallow has a strong vanilla flavor and the blue shark top is strawberry. The other red and blue whale looking gummi was similar, except that the domed center had a softer goo inside - not a full syrup, just a softer jelly center.

The sea turtles were about the best of the bunch, vanilla base and flavored gummi tops. The orange was like a creamsicle and blue was a nicely rendered raspberry.

Fini is a nice, mid-range brand of sugar candy sold rarely in the United States under their own brand. You can find them in bulk bins, mostly as sour sanded, fruity licorice ropes and tape. But there’s nothing to merit the price of these though the packaging is decent enough. As far as Sugarpova goes, they’ve done a good job curating a specific set of candies and packaging them in a way that makes them appealing. But aside from the gumballs, there’s very little unique in the candy line otherwise.

The gummis and gum are gluten free. For those people who are sensitive be careful to read the labels on all the packages, as some varieties do contain wheat and soy.

Related Candies

1. Storck Mamba Gummies
2. Ball Gum Balls (Football & Tennis)
3. Flix Sour Gummy Pop Corn
4. Trader Joe’s Gummy Tummies
5. Haribo Saure Dinosaurier
6. Big Mo’ Bars: Peanut Butter & Creamy Caramel
7. Gummy Fishies
8. Gummi Clown Fish

I’ve only been to Amsterdam once, so I’m not certain whether the name of this chocolate bar is compelling in its native culture, but I found it a little odd: Droste Cookie Milkchocolate XXL Pastille. It’s also possible that in the year 2013, all the good candy bar names have been taken and now confectioners are just using random word sequence generators based on the elements within the bar.

Luckily the picture on the package does most of the communication. It’s a chocolate bar, made with milk chocolate, in the form of a sectioned circular disk, filled with cookie bits.

The bar is only 50 grams (1.75 ounces) so it’s a generous single serving or two petite portions.

The disk is three inches across, and if my math is sufficient, each section is about 7/16th of an ounce.

The chocolate smells very milky, quite sweet and has a hint of malt to it (my guess is from the cookie). The snap is good and the distribution of the cookie bits looks generous but well balanced with the chocolate.

The melt is nice, silky even. It’s a little sticky but the cookie dust cuts through that. The chocolate tastes a bit salty, which is odd because the sodium content isn’t alarming (55 mg). The cookie bits are like digestives, quite dry and crumbly with a little hint of salt and malt and barely sweet at all. On the whole, it was very munchable and it reminded me how much I loved Droste as a kid. It was the premium chocolate I remember getting the most (the pastilles in the hexagonal box) and helped me to appreciate dark chocolate.

The price as a little steep, $2 for a single serving. The Ritter Sport Biscuit bar, with 100 grams (twice as much) for only 50 cents more at Cost Plus is probably what I’d put in my basket next time.

The bar contains gluten and may have traces of peanuts and tree nuts. There’s no statement about sustainability or ethical sourcing, but the Droste website is mostly in Dutch and the English part isn’t very well written. There are other versions of this bar at Cost Plus World Market, so I might try some as the weather cools off. (The “feels like” temp here in the neighborhood is 119 today.)

Related Candies

1. Russell Stover Big Bite Dark Chocolate S’Mores
2. M&Ms Sweet & Salty Snack Mix
3. Glico Pocky Cookie Crush
4. Ritter Sport Neapolitan Wafers
5. Ferrara Dark Chocolate Covered Biscotti
6. Twix Triple Chocolate
7. Ritter Sport Assortment
8. Droste Pastilles: Extra Dark

Ritter Sport is the brand of German chocolate bars that come in a square format and more than a dozen different varieties. The newest is Ritter Sport Coconut in milk chocolate.  The package says it’s with tropical coconut flakes in a coconut and milk filling.

I like how inexpensive Ritter Sport is compared to other consumer brands from Europe, like Cadbury Dairy Milk or Lindt, and balances quality and munchability. No, it’s not exquisitely fine chocolate, but it’s fantastic chocolate candy.

I tried another version of a coconut bar from Ritter Sport a few years ago, a sample bar from their store in Waldenbuch, Germany called the Ritter Sport Kokosmakrone which also had some corn flakes in the coconut cream. The cream center is a common format for Ritter Sport, in fact, a lot of German candy bars like those from Milka also use this style.

The ingredients were a little disappointing. Ingredient #1 is Sugar and ingredient #2 is Palm Oil. This is similar to the Amarena Cherry I had earlier this year, which is also a filled bar. The saturated fat content is 45% of your daily RDA in 6 pieces. The other interesting ingredient, though far down the list, is hazelnut paste.

The milk chocolate is rich, sweet and smooth. The coconut center is interesting, because the coconut is actually crunchy and the filling with it is quite smooth and creamy, unlike the moist and chewy Mounds bar filling. I liked the filling quite a bit, and had no trouble finishing the bar. Coconut is not my favorite of all of their inclusions and I don’t usually like their white cream filled bars either. So I’ll probably stick to the Corn Flakes bar over this one.

Though Ritter Sport has a sustainability pact for their cocoa, there’s no mention of the source of their palm oil.

Related Candies

1. 3 Musketeers Coconut
2. Snow Angell Organic Candy Bar
3. Dove Milk Chocolate Coconut Creme Eggs
4. Mounds
5. Ritter Schokowurfel
6. Kisses Coconut Creme
7. Ritter Sport Assortment

The Boyer Candy Company may be best known for their Mallo Cups, which they’ve been making since the 1930s which they claim is the first “cup candy”. (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were introduced in 1928, but were not actually sold in little fluted paper cups at first.)

It’s natural for there to be other versions of the chocolate cup with a marshmallow filling and coconut topping. The Boyer Dark Chocolate Mallo Cup is really just the same, even the simple packaging looks like they’ve been making this version for 50 years.

The bumpy top of the cup shows that there is actually some coconut underneath. Like every Mallo Cup I think I’ve had in the past 20 years, the bottom stuck to the wrapper (I think freezing them prevents this, but changes the textures). It smells a bit like coconut and of course chocolate with a strong whiff of vanilla.

The interesting thing to note about the Mallo Cups is that they’re not actually marshmallow. (Though the name is Mallo Cup, the description on the package says that the center is whipped creme.) Marshmallow, for the most part, is made with gelatin. The Mallo Cups are made with egg whites. That would mean that these are really a meringue creme. The center is a great texture, it’s soft and creamy without too much stickiness and no grain whatsoever.

The dark chocolate has a decent flavor to it, though not complex or overpowering, it has a nice chocolate candy contribution to the whole. The coconut flakes within give some texture ... overall, it’s a good modernization of the classic candy cups. I’d love it if they spent a little time fixing the production issue of the oozing and insufficient base.

Related Candies

1. Sun Cups
2. Elmer’s Dark Chocolate Heavenly Hash & Gold Brick Eggs
3. Idaho Spud
4. Boyer Smoothie
5. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Line
6. Boyer’s Mallo Cup
7. Cup-O-Gold