There are so many ways this review for Topp’s new Blue Razz Wazoo could start.

I could talk about the fact that this candy bar is unlike any other that I’ve ever tried.

I could talk about how it is the antithesis of most new candy bar launches: it has no extra fortification of vitamins or caffeine or omega3 fatty acids. There are no marketing tie ins, it’s barely even branded with the name of the company that puts it out. It’s not low in calories, it’s not made from 100% recycled plastic it’s not biodegradable.

I could talk about what I think a wazoo is (and dictionaries agree).

I could talk about the cultural references it brought to mind. Like Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which his character finds out when he wakes up 200 years in the future that all the organic rice, wheat germ and tiger’s milk are inferior to steak, hot fudge and cream pies.

Mostly it made me think about the late George Carlin had a bit in his stand-up back in the 70s about blue food:

Why is there no blue food? I can’t find blue food - I can’t find the flavor of blue! I mean, green is lime; yellow is lemon; orange is orange; red is cherry; what’s blue? There’s no blue! Oh, they say, “Blueberries!” Uh-uh; blue on the vine, purple on the plate. There’s no blue food! Where is the blue food? We want the blue food! Probably bestows immortality! They’re keeping it from us! (source - watch clip)

Instead of all that, I’ll try to stay clinical.

The Blue Razz Wazoo is similar in format to a bar like 3 Musketeers, though a bit smaller. It clocks in at only 1.6 ounces and is about 4.5 inches long.

The structure is pretty easy to understand. Two layers of flavored chewy filling covered in a blue version of a white confectionery coating and then sprinkled with festive colored crunchies.

Those in cupcake circles may be more comfortable with the shocking appearance of this bar than I am. Unlike George Carlin, I usually suspect blue food is poison. (Because it’s made with poison!)

The bar smells like raspberry. It smells a lot. If you are looking for a way to freshen up your house and don’t want to splurge for an air freshener, pop down to 7-11 and pick up one of these. Put slices of the bar on saucers in every room in the house. The scent is actually rather nice, it has booth the floral perfume and the woodsy seed notes down pretty well.

The assortment of crunchies are fun, and they’re actually flavored too, a little tangy berry flavor to them. (The package says they’re made in Thailand, the rest of the bar is made in the USA.)

Biting into the bar, it’s a soft nougat texture with a tangy raspberry flavor to it. One layer is sweet and the other has the tart bite to it. It’s a little grainy towards the end of the chew, kind of like a fluffy AirHead. The blue confectionery coating is also flavored (or if it wasn’t when it was put on there, but the time it gets to the consumer, it’s been infiltrated by the plethora of raspberry).

Frankly, it’s not a bad bar. It’s funky looking and I can see that being a huge appeal to kids. The package design does portray the bar accurately. It’s certainly different, so I didn’t feel like it was a retread of other bars that have been around for ages.

So kudos for Topps for coming up with something original. I think the name is unfortunate. (Do they not have an internet connection at the Topps research and development facility? Or participate in English-speaking culture?) But then again, I never would have thought the Baby Bottle Pops would be such a huge sensation. I can’t see myself buying this again ... though I’ll be curious to see if other flavor variations come out.

UPDATE 3/20/2009:

Topps finally included the Wazoo on the website. They’ve also launched an advertising campaign. Here’s a commercial:

If you enjoyed that, or were freaked out by it, you might really like these outtakes from the commercial shoot.

For those having difficulty getting a hold of the candy, they may be a little hard to come by. According to one of my industry insiders, there have been some manufacturing difficulties that may interrupt shipping.

Sera of The Candy Enthusiast has a photo of the Wild Berriez version.

Related Candies

1. Topps Wild Berriez Wazoo
2. Big Bite Gummy Bear
3. Junior Fruit Cremes
4. 3 Musketeers Cherry & Raspberry
5. Bratz Candy Cosmetics
6. Gummi Lightning Bugs
7. Rolly Pop
8. Kinder Egg

Skittles Crazy Cores were announced late last year and have been on shelves for at least a month. I was lucky enough to find some at a convenience store in Studio City while I was refueling my car yesterday.

The orange package fits in perfectly with the current array of Skittles but sports one of Mars’ new features, front of package nutritional labeling.

It says right on the front what’s inside. You’re gonna get 230 calories per pack, that’s 12% of your daily caloric intake.

I don’t know if that makes it a good value for 99 cents or not. (Actually, I do know that it’s not a very good nutritional value.)

Crazy Cores are two flavors in each Skittle, and the centers are even colored.

Mango & Peach - is a pleasant creamy light orange color on the outside and a peachy color on the inside.

I don’t know what the layering on this was as I often find peach flavor and mango flavor rather similar. The coating, I belive, is peach and the center is a bit more peppery which would make it mango.

I love fresh peaches and mangoes, but I’ve never been a big fan of the candy flavors that come from them. These are no different. I didn’t avoid them, but they’re not a color I’d pick out for initial eating.

An odd note, I found the center of all of these to be rather hard, harder than a fresh Skittle should be.

Blue Raspberry & Lemon

Sadly I only got four of these blue beauties in my package. I usually eat blue things last as they’re often punch flavors. In this case it’s just a blue colored raspberry which is fine with me. The soft floral outside went really well with the tangy citrus chew of the inside. Kind of like a raspberry lemonade.

Melon Berry

This was another one of those odd colors that Skittles sometimes end up. It’s mauve or maybe raspberries & cream.

It sounded pretty bad to me, but then again, I actually eat fresh melons and berries together all the time, so it’s not like this idea is so far fetched.

The outside is a soft watermelon flavor, rather like a Jolly Rancher. Inside it’s more tangy and also rather melon tasting with a little bit of a strawberry flavor.

Strawberry Watermelon

At this point I was wondering which flavor was supposed to be on the outside, not that it should really matter. As with the Melon Berry, Watermelon Strawberry is a natural combo with fresh fruit.

It has a very strong artificial flavor component, but overall I was pleased with the fake watermelon and passable Strawberry Starburst flavor.

Cherry Lemonade

I thought I could make a go of this one, but the cherry was very much like cough medicine and not like Lifesavers. The lemonade was missing that good citrus burst & tangy component so it was a total loss.

Here’s the deal, there are five different Skittles here, each a combo of two flavors. But the number of flavors represented isn’t ten, it’s only seven (maybe eight, depending on how you categorize melon & watermelon as distinct flavors).

1. Lemon & Lemonade
2. Cherry
3. Mango
4. Peach
5. Blue Raspberry & Berry
6. Watermelon & Melon
7. Strawberry

I didn’t think I could be more disappointed in a package of Skittles since the Chocolate Mix ones came out in 2007. But these are just dreadful. There are some great fruit flavors out there that could have been combined to great effect. Instead it’s far too much in the melon & peach family, which will probably make some candy lovers very happy and I wish them all the best with these.

Odd note: gelatin is not listed in the ingredients. In fact, the wrapper now says “Gluten-Free, Gelatin-Free.”

I bought two packages and will now find someone who will eat the second one. (And I still have some Carnival Skittles left, so I’ll eat those instead.)

I’m going to say it one more time. Mars, make Citrus Mix Skittles: tangerine, meyer lemon, key lime, sweet orange & pink grapefruit.

Related Candies

1. Runts
2. Skittles Chocolate Mix
3. Skittles from the UK
4. Skittles Carnival Flavors
5. Skittles (Fruits, Wild Berry, Tropical, Smoothies & Sour)
6. Skittles Fresh Mint
7. Skittles Ice Cream

De la Rosa Mazapan is a dulce de cacahuate or peanut confection. It seems like one of the most common candies to every culture is some sort of sweetened nut paste. Halvah, marzipan and if you throw in a little chocolate, gianduia, and all of their different variations.

I see these little disks of mazapan at the grocery stores all the time in Los Angeles, but this was the first time I saw them with their complete packaging with full ingredients & nutrition labeling. I picture them as something that a mom would tuck into their child’s lunch bag as a special little treat.

The ingredients are pretty simple and two thirds wholesome: peanuts and sugar and artificial flavors.

So first, I’ll tell you what I expected: I thought it’d be a sweet peanut butter disk. I thought it’d be like halvah, a little more crumbly than almond marzipan.

Here’s what it was actually like:

It was crumbly. When I opened the package it cracked into several large pieces easily. It smells wonderful, like peanut butter cookie dough.

But instead of being spiky and crystalline like halvah, it was smooth and cool on the tongue, dissolving like peanut butter flavored icing sugar.

Oh, it’s sweet. It’s absolutely more sugar than peanuts. The peanut flavor is throughout with some little crunchy chunks here and there.

I love the texture, though definitely not the mess. (Someday I’ll compile a list of “not keyboard friendly” candies and this will certainly be on it.) I wish it was just a little fattier, but far be it from me to mess with a traditional candy. Or maybe a little salt added, but again, that’s a personal preference, I like a bit of salt with my peanuts.

It strikes me that this would be a great hiking candy, a good mix of straight and easily accessible sugars and some satisfying protein. But again, it’s so very sweet and far too dry.

But I can’t really get behind it. Maybe I’ll give out the rest for Halloween. Or maybe try stuffing some into some crescent rolls to see what kind of a treat that makes.

Related Candies

1. Nips: Butter Rum & Peanut Butter Parfait
2. Fairhaven Candy Crumblz!
3. Colt’s Bolts
4. Reese’s Pieces
5. Planters Peanut Bar Original

While I’m probably painted as something of an anti-mockolate crusader, I don’t hate all quasi-chocolate products. Things like Andes Mints and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew are pretty good even though they’re not quite real chocolate candies.

So I thought I’d give the Andes Fall Harvet limited edition mix a try.

It includes three flavors: toffee, orange and cocoa. Each little plank of candy is individually wrapped and comes in a nicely designed bag with orange leaf outlines all over it. Instead of the usual Andes logo on each piece of candy, these have three random embossed harvest themed designs.

The ingredients aren’t promising: Sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (palm kernel & palm), nonfat milk, cocoa, lactose, milk protein concentrate, cocoa processed wtih alkalai, corn syrup solids, soy lecithin, salt, baking soda, molasses, orange oil, natural and artificial flavors, artificial colors (yellow 5 & 6).

The burnt yellow wrapper makes me think more of mustard than Toffee. It smells of butter and sugar, which is a very encouraging sign.

This piece is the only one of the set that’s not layered like Andes Mints. Instead it’s a milk chocolatey confection with toffee bits mixed in.

The toffee bits are very crisp and crunchy and remind me more of a brittle (which is often a bit foamy but not quite a honeycomb or sponge candy). The crunches are a little salty as well. The mockolate confection is very sweet but doesn’t have much cocoa flavor to it. A little on the waxy side at room temperature, it does okay texture-wise in the mouth.

I love the combo of orange and chocolate. The Orange was really what got me to buy this bag.

It smells like orange confection, kind of like a cheap version of Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

It’s quite sweet and a little grainy on the tongue (kind of like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange). The orange essence is quite pronounced with a strong zest and slight bitterness to it. To balance that there’s plenty of sugar. But don’t expect any dash of chocolate flavor in there. It might be a cocoa colored confection on the top and bottom, but the orange flavor goes straight through.

The least appealing of the assortment was Cocoa.

It’s the same light colored mockolate confection as the other two, this time with a darker mockolate sandwiched in the middle.

It’s a little saltier than the orange one, which helps. It does taste a bit like hot cocoa, but also a little like cardboard and Tootsie Rolls.

Four pieces provided 50% of my daily intake of saturated fat ... and not even a good one like cocoa butter.

I think I’ll stick with the original from now on.

Related Candies

1. Goldie’s Premium Carob Bar
2. Bel Chocolatey Bars
3. Kissables (Reformulated)
4. M&Ms Premiums
5. Dove Silky Smooth Milk Chocolate Bars
6. Roca Buttercrunch Thins

Long before I was aware of official FDA definitions for things like chocolate, I was aware that there were chocolate pretenders.

When I was a kid chocolate was regarded as something completely lacking in any merit nutritionally. As an alternative there were carob products. Usually things like carob drops for oatmeal cookies and carob covered milk balls as treats.

Even though I don’t think I had much of a sophisticated palate as a child (I ate Jell-O powder straight from the box), I still knew the difference and preferred real chocolate products.

But now I’m an adult with an awareness of my ability to set aside childhood traumas of being given this supposed treat of carob raisins instead of actual chocolate. (And I certainly question why anyone without allergies would replace chocolate with carob in our modern and well-informed world.) So I picked up what I thought might be a representation of good carob.

Carob is an evergreen legume that puts out little pods which are harvested and turned into carob powder. (If you’ve seen Locust Bean tree, they’re closely related and look like that.) It’s been used by humans for at least 4,000 years throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Early sugar was made from these pods.

Carob contains both sugar-sweetness and a roasted flavor that is reminiscent of chocolate in some ways but because it contains no substantial oils or fats of its own, it’s usually consumed as a powder (often called St. John’s bread) in drinks or baked goods. When combined with some fats it can be made into a pasty block somewhat like chocolate.

The simple paper wrapper for Goldie’s Premium Carob Bar says, “no refined sugar, no preservatives, no chocolate, cocoa or caffeine.” Wow, there’s a lot that’s not in there. And I love every one of those things save one.

The ingredients don’t sound too bad to me: Barley malt, fractionated palm kernel oil, carob powder, soy lecithin and milk. (I don’t feel great about fractionated palm kernel oil - I don’t know what it is.) But I love barley malt and milk!

Opening it up, it looks like a milk chocolate bar, but the back of it looks more like freshly poured brownie batter. I recognize that comparing this to chocolate is unfair, so I won’t for the rest of this.

The snap is kind of soft, but the product is solid, not gooey or melted at all.

It smells like roasted grains. It reminds me a lot of Postum (a drink made from, well, roasted grains).

The texture is rather like eating unbaked pie crust or shortbread dough. It’s thick and rather hearty but with really no melt-in-your mouth-qualities.

I could dissolve it, but it was always a bit waxy. Chewing it resulted in a bit more of a creamy puddle in my mouth as long as I kept it circulating, though it still had a bit of a peanut butter stickiness to it.

I liked the roasted flavors and that it wasn’t very sweet. But the flavor never really popped for me. I’m a big fan of barley. My favorite tea lately is Mugi Cha, which is Japanese roasted barley steeped just like tea (which I was introduced to as a latte at a little place in Hollywood about four years ago). I love barley sugar candy, barley flour in baked goods, especially just barley in soups, pilafs and stews and of course malted milk balls.

I found Goldie’s Carob Bar rib-sticking and substantial but sadly lacking in satisfaction. I could see being happier with it as an ingredient in a combination bar of some sort, maybe with nuts, caramel or wafers/pretzels of some sort. A dash of salty cashews might be a nice complement.

I don’t think carob is a bad thing, I just think it got a bad reputation back in the 70s. This is good quality stuff with a really intriguing flavor (kind of reminds me of halvah in a way) but just not for me.

The nutritional profile of carob is actually not as good as chocolate - no minerals, no calcium or fiber but some protein and virtually the same fat and calories per ounce.

Related Candies

1. Palmer Hollow Chocolate Flavored Bunny
2. Welch’s Fruit ‘n Yogurt Snacks
3. Dark Raisinets
4. Malted Crisped Rice Squares
5. Jelly Belly Chocolate Malt Balls

Flavored white chocolate is kind of a strange thing, not something I cared much for as a kid, but as an adult I’m warming up to it. Perhaps because there are some really good options out there.

Meiji, one of Japan’s major candy & snack companies uses white and flavored white chocolates in many of their confections. The flavors range from berry and flower flavors (sakura) to green tea and caramel.

I found this Meiji Rich Strawberry Chocolate bar in Little Tokyo at Murukai Market, but every store seemed to carry them.

The bar is much deeper in color than the KitKats or even the limited edition Hershey’s flavored white chocolate bars that I’ve had. And the intensity of the color matches the flavor. It’s much more in the berry range than the “light touch of berries”. It’s both tangy and sweet, with that woodsy flavor of seeds in there as well.

I wasn’t as fond of it as a I’d hoped. Something about the tangy mixed with the sweetness and a bit of grain from the real berry in there made me miss the cocoa butter and milk base. But for $1.29, it was a great buy for a little more exotic taste than the ordinary.

Rating: 6 out of 10

For Licorice Fans, the Klene Krokantjes are all licorice, but three different “jelly bean” style varieties in one bag.

I wasn’t sure what these would be, I thought something like the Skoolkrijt that I’ve come to love. I assumed it was a licorice center with a candy coating. I found a description online that said, “Salty Salmiak & Mint Flavor with a crunchy outer shell” which didn’t really capture it all (except that it included that it was salted licorice, not the straight sweet kind).

There are three shapes, a dark and a light jelly bean style and a larger, um, rock. I didn’t even know there was a third shape at first, as there were only two in the bag so I didn’t photograph it.

The candies look like little granite pebbles. Black and white and gray, they’re speckled and natural looking. They don’t smell like much, just a bit sweet with a slight anise note.

The beans are two different flavors. The light one is a peppermint, menthol and licorice mix of flavors. There’s a lot of crunch outside, it’s a bit grainy. The inside isn’t a molasses/wheat chewy licorice. Instead it’s a gelatin gummi flavored with licorice (and salt). The combo isn’t bad, a little metallic but the mint helps kind of smooth it all together.

The gray ones were similar but more on the straight licorice side. (They might not have been minted, but the proximity made them so.)

The lumps were a piece of the wheat based chew, again a little salted and covered with the minty crunch. That was my favorite.

They’re a little confusing for me. Not enough of one thing or another and the lack of the molasses punch to go with the licorice (my favorite combo) just didn’t make me want more and I never finished the bag.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

My favorite gum is Chiclets. They’re not easy to find but are one of the few gums that is still made with sugar and not artificial sweeteners (and no coloring either, for whatever that’s worth).

I was saddened several years ago to see that Wrigley’s altered their time-tested favorites: Wrigley’s Spearmint, Doublemint, Juicyfruit and Big Red gums to include those sorts of things. But then at Munchies in Los Angeles I stumbled across this little treasure - Juicy Fruit Gum, not only is it Kosher (which I don’t really need) but it’s also made with sugar and on top of that, they’re candy coated chicklets!

The box was cute and held 20 pellets. I usually chew three pieces at a time, so at 50 cents it’s no different in price than the regular pack.

I liked the crunch of the sugar shell and the indeterminate mellow fruity flavor of the chew. The flavor doesn’t last very long, but I don’t usually chew gum for a long time, just long enough to get most of the sugar out then I rinse and repeat.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Related Candies

1. Three Pink Bubble Gums
2. Licorice Assortment
3. KitKat Chocolatier (Strawberry & Green Tea)
4. Short & Sweet: Japanese Goodies
5. Hershey’s Raspberries ‘n’ Creme
6. Salted Licorices: Djungelvral and Dubbel Zout

I realized when I started Candy Blog that there was no way I’d ever sample every single candy out there, let alone review them. What’s making it even harder now is that candies that I’ve already reviewed have changed and it hardly seems fair that the reviews here still stand against the present day products.

So, every once in a while I’ll revisit major products that have changed since my original review at least enough to warrant a new taste.

Hershey’s introduced the Take 5 in 2004 and it quickly became one of my favorite new candies. It combined all the great textures of crunchy pretzels and chewy caramel and creamy chocolate. But that was then, and this is now.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking (I photographed it last summer again) the Hershey’s Take 5 left the list of chocolate candy bars and joined the growing list of Hershey’s Real Mockolate. 

The package now says: made with chocolate & pretzels & caramel & peanuts & peanut butter. That “made with chocolate” part means that the coating may contain chocolate, but it has other additives such as vegetable oils that mean that it’s not pure chocolate. The actual chocolate as an ingredient comes far down on the list as the number 6 item, after vegetable oils and high fructose corn sweetener and before nonfat milk (you can imagine there’s not that much milk in there).

The bars actually still look quite fetching. Little rather rectangular lumps with a pleasant sweet & peanutty scent.

Mine were exceptionally fresh, the pretzel was good and crunchy, a nice salty complement to the sweet coating. The coating didn’t have much flavor but did add a creamy texture.

This one was passably good, but I’ve had others in the past few months (I picked them out of a mix of snack size in a bowl at the office a couple of times) and I didn’t realize why they were kind of empty tasting for what I remembered. I just thought they were stale ... turns out that they’re just not designed to be good any longer.

Hershey’s still has an opportunity to reverse this and make it real chocolate again.

Product: Hershey’s Take 5
Previous Review: 7/13/2005
Change: milk chocolate coating is replaced with a fake chocolate coating (which contains chocolate but also other vegetable oils).
Result: For now they’re off my list but still get a passing rating of 5 out of 10.

Sunkist Fruit Gems are made by Jelly Belly these days. An alert reader let me know that the little “single serve” trays are back on store shelves, but instead of holding six fruit jellies, they now only have four.

Worst part of this news? The grapefruit one was missing. (What is it about grapefruit disappearing lately? Is it because of the news that grapefruit juice interacts with some prescription drugs?) This is not to say that the Sunkist Fruit Gems don’t come in grapefruit any longer, just not in this particular package.

The flavors included now are: Orange, Lemon, Lime and Raspberry. The old package was 2.4 ounces, the new one is only 1.35 ounces.

Seeing how Sunkist is known as a citrus company, the fact that they made an assortment the neglects one of the citrus fruits and includes a berry is beyond me. The package is also similar to the old one and actually includes images of grapefruit (though the text clearly says which flavors are in the package).

The change in manufacturing location and ownership, as far as I’ve been able to tell, has made no difference at all for the actual candy. It’s still a nice, soft and flavorful fruit jelly without too much of a granulated sugar coating.

The only real difference here is that you get only 2/3 as much as you used to. I was hoping when Jelly Belly took over that they’d sell the jellies in individual flavors like they do with their famous jelly beans. No such luck yet. (For now whenever I see the Jelly Belly booth at a trade show I pick a half a dozen grapefruit jellies out of their sample bin and move along.)

Product: Sunkist Fruit Gems
Previous Review: November 15, 2006
Change: New owners (Jelly Belly) and smaller package
Result: I didn’t care much for raspberry or lime, so with such a small package and only two pieces I do like it’s not worth it. 4 out of 10

Mars used to make a bar that was called, appropriately enough, the Mars Bar. That bar was discontinued and reintroduced under the much more famous Snickers umbrella of products as the Snickers Almond.

Then something happened, Mars mucked around with it and created the “More Satisfying Snickers Almond” which was really just the Snickers Almond with peanuts thrown in to make up for a lack of, well, almonds. It wasn’t a bad bar, but it wasn’t really distinctive.

Well, the old new Snickers Almond is back. It’s a white lightly sweet & salty nougat with a caramel stripe and whole almonds covered in milk chocolate.

I like the bar (though I prefer the dark chocolate version) and I’m glad they brought it back.

Product: Mars Snickers Almond
Previous Reviews: 12/28/2005 & 8/14/2006
Change: reverting to old recipe (eliminating peanut ingredients from previous version)
Result: A great bar with a long history and I’m glad that it’s back to a more classic formulation so it bumps up a notch. 6 out of 10

Related Candies

1. Grapefruit Mentos (Japan)
2. Snickers Rockin’ Nut Road Bar
3. Head to Head: Twisted vs Take 5
4. Snickers Almond Dark
5. Take 5 Peanut Butter

Hershey’s makes several varieties of their Miniatures line. I picked up Hershey’s Special Dark Miniatures as I’d never seen them before and they seemed to promise dark chocolate versions of the old favorites Krackel and Mr. Goodbar (though not by name).

The bag was a bit larger than the other Hershey’s Miniatures that I bought at the same time and has only three varieties instead of four.

But the most notable part is the appearance of the little seal that Hershey’s puts on some of their dark chocolate confections, it says that this is a “natural source of flavinol antioxidants.” At only about 45% cacao content, yes, I guess it qualifies as a source, though not a terribly dense one. Hershey’s has some wonderfully convincing documentation about this on their website, though they’re probably purposefully vague about how much of these beneficial compounds are in any given serving.

The assortment here is rather balanced between the three varieties: 13 Special Dark, 11 Special Dark with Crisp Rice and 12 Special Dark with Peanuts.

I just reviewed the Special Dark on Friday, but for those who don’t feel like clicking over, here are the relevant parts of that again:

It smells sweet, a little woodsy.

The texture is rather chalky and doesn’t melt into a creamy puddle in my mouth. Instead it just tastes sweet and more like hot cocoa made with water than real rich chocolate ... there’s a thin-ness to it all, probably because Hershey’s now uses milk fat.

There’s a dry finish with a slight metallic bite to it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

The Special Dark with Peanuts comes in a mustard yellow wrapper, which I figured is to remind us of the Mr. Goodbar. Why they don’t just call it Mr. Goodbar Dark or Mr. Darkbar or something, I have no clue.

Though the ingredients on the wrapper are not broken out for each of the individually wrapped varieties, the list is clear, these are all real chocolate. There are no additional oils present except for those native to the chocolate or dairy ones (permissable in present definitions).

The little bars are cute and look really just like you’d expect a dark Mr. Goodbar - dark sheen and little nuts poking through.

It smells like dark roasted peanuts and cocoa.

The bite has a good snap and an immediate mix of bitter notes from both the peanuts (which look like they’re roasted very dark) and the chocolate. The texture isn’t super creamy, but is consistent with an okay melt.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I brought a lot of my own baggage to the Special Dark with Crisp Rice as I was hoping Hershey’s could be redeemed. Perhaps with the one hand they’d taken away a beloved favorite but with the other they’d snuck a glorious replacement into this mix.

It looks much like the Peanut version, but smells much sweeter with only the lightest whiff of malt.

The crunch isn’t as pronounced as the old Milk Chocolate or present Mockolate version, but has a nice texture. The malty flavor of the rice is completely lost in the thin cocoa flavor and sweetness. The texture doesn’t seem as creamy or melt as easily for some reason, but I can’t call it waxy.

It’s less bitter than the others though, so provides a nice counterpoint.

Is the Krackel and Hershey’s redeemed? No. But it’s a passable effort.

Rating: 5 out of 10.

I didn’t even try asking Hershey’s what the ingredients for the individual pieces are, because I’m not entitled to know should I decide to pick only one of the variety to eat.

If I needed to buy a chocolate miniature assortment from Hershey’s again, I’d have to pick this one up instead of the old favorites. But even with the higher ratings than that one, I don’t see myself picking this up again.

Related Candies

1. Hershey’s Special Dark with Almonds
2. M&Ms Premiums: Dark Chocolate
3. Hershey’s Nuggets Double Chocolate
4. Hershey’s Special Dark Pieces
5. Kissables Dark