Candy Blog

Wrigley’s, now owned by Mars, has introduced Life Savers Gummies Spooky Shapes for Halloween.

Inside the box, which has an oddly angled end (which does make opening and closing the box a bit easier) is a mylar pouch with the candy inside. It’s well sealed and fresh. The package shows three shapes and colors, but makes no mention of the flavors inside.

The gummis are tiny, similar to the scale of the Easter variety, and the shapes are hard to make out.

I found a witch’s head with a hat, a jack o lantern, a ghost, a hissing cat and a crescent moon.

They’re all soft and squishy with very little greasy coating and yet they don’t stick together much.

The flavors are identical, I think, to the standard Life Savers Gummies mix these days:

Watermelon is light green. It’s soft and tart and kind of unripe tasting.
Strawberry is bright pink. I wouldn’t call it vibrant, but it’s definitely different from the others.
Cherry is dark red and pretty much what you’d expect from Life Savers - woodsy, weird and slightly medicinal. Overall, I’m starting to like it.
Green Apple is the medium green. It has a good apple peel flavor to it, well rounded with both sweetness and sour.
Blackberry must be the purplish one. It doesn’t taste like much, a little like iced tea and perfume.

Overall, I didn’t think much of the shapes, they’re too difficult to discern. The size is strange, considering the standard shape and size of Life Savers’ large hoops. The flavors don’t taste as bold as I’m accustomed to the hard candy version. I also miss tangerine. The colors feel like the season though.

As a Wrigley’s product, which now includes Skittles and Starburst, this marketing and product design feels a little out of step with current trends. But maybe a little nostalgic “lack of polish” is refreshing. Still, it’s cheaper to just get the all year round version in the peg bag. Just pretend the Life Savers are O’s and they’re haunting you.

Related Candies

1. LifeSavers Gummies: Bunnies & Eggs
2. Grave Grabber Gummy Candy
3. Brach’s Gummi Candy Corn
4. LifeSavers Tangy Fruits Gummies
5. LifeSavers
6. Brain Candy! (gummi brains)
7. Lifesaver Gummies

I saw these little candies making the rounds as a meme, but I didn’t see them in person until I went to Germany.

It’s a Swiss hazelnut chocolate confection shaped into a pocket knife and wrapped in red foil to look like a Swiss Army Knife.

The Mindestens Swiss Chocolate Knife is a pretty simple little candy. The center is soft gianduia (chocolate hazelnut paste) and covered with milk chocolate. It’s sweet and soft, nothing spectacular, as I’ve had much better gianduia before. But it’s hard to quibble with the design, as both the foil and the molding of the chocolate is so attentive to details. Seek them out if you have a Swiss Army Knife fan in the family.

Jordan Almonds are one of the oldest confections. Panning nuts with a hard sugar shell is not only a beautiful way to serve nuts, it also seals the nuts up so that they don’t get rancid.

I picked up this cheap box at Rite Aid a few weeks ago because it was on sale for 75 cents but it’s not the first time I’ve purchased them. I picked them up on sale before, about three years ago when I took these photos. No, the packaging hasn’t changed. In fact, the copyright on the box says 1999 (but the expiration date for this box was December 2011).

I’ve never heard of the brand La Pone which is a division of Kings Candy Company. But I figured Jordan Almonds are all kinda the same.

I was encouraged that these were Thin Shell, as sometimes the sugar coating is so thick as to scare me that it’s really a candy encased rock.

The sugar coated almonds come in a variety of soft pastel colors: pink, yellow, orange and green plus a bright pink. They’re shiny and huge. At first I thought it was because the almonds were really big, but it turns out that the shell is really thick. So thick that I have to wonder what their regular non-“Thin Shell” version is like.

They were hard, definitely not something to just mindlessly crunch away at. The shell is sweet, but not sticky or sickly. The nuts are fresh and chewy but not quite crunchy. I didn’t get any fake flavors like a lot of vanilla or almond extract, though an unnamed artificial flavor is on the ingredients.

The shell made me nervous, and I’m not good at sucking on things until I can crunch them. They’re pretty cheap, even at regular price which seems to be about $1.25 when I’ve seen them. It’s a nice snack that cuts down on the overall calorie load of plain nuts (almonds area bout 160 calories per ounce, these are 127 calories per ounce). The shell definitely kept me from gobbling them up too quickly.

The colors are inoffensive. This sort of packaging isn’t quite right for weddings or favors, but as a sort of way to bring back that wedding feeling they’ll do in a pinch.

(Also of concern in the ingredients is flour, so this is off limits for gluten free folks. They’re Kosher and otherwise vegan as long as you’re good with artificial colors and titanium dioxide.)

Related Candies

1. Eat with your Eyes: Maison Pecou Jordan Almonds
2. Marich All Natural Holland Mints & Chocolate Jordan Almonds
3. Sconza Jordanettes
4. Romanego Dragees, Cordials & Fondants
5. Confetti & Agrumetti

So I’ve tried the Zachary Thick Mints and the Zachary Mini Mints. Today I have the Zachary Thin Mints. This is probably where I should have started, as this is the standard set of ratios that all other peppermint fondant and chocolate candies should be judged against.

The Zachary line of candies are very well priced. They’re often sold at dollar stores and other discounters. I happened to find my set of both the mini mints and the Zachary Raspberry Thin Mints. They were on sale for 79 cents for a box that holds 3.5 ounces. That’s the same price as a regular York Peppermint Pattie. Kind of a crazy comparison.

The boxes are small and rather nicely designed. Spare but they provide the essential protection of the stuff inside and have a bunch of information on them that they’re obligated to carry like ingredients, and nutrition facts and include the notation that they’re made in the United States (which York Peppermint Patties can no longer say).

Inside the Thin Mints are in a little tray. It has two sections, kind of misleading about the amount of candy, especially when compared to the similarly priced Haviland Thin Mints that have 5 ounces in a box and all natural ingredients.

There were 12 mints in my packages. Yes, the two sections are uneven. One holds 5 patties and the other 7 patties. I have no idea why it’s formatted that way.

The Peppermint Thin Mints are rather ordinary. They’re small, about 1.25 inches in diameter, like little coins. My mint ones were in good condition with very few scuff marks.

The fondant is soft, almost chewy. It’s like a cross between the gooey center of a Junior Mint and the softer center of the Haviland. They’re not strong, just an all around inoffensive mint. The peppermint is clean and doesn’t really overpower the mild semi-sweet chocolate. It’s like eating a handful of baking chips. It’s not extraordinary chocolate, a little on the gritty side but real.

The second version is the Raspberry Thin Mints which I thought were going to be just raspberry flavored fondant. Nope, there’s mint in there, too.

These were horrid. The raspberry was fake and floral and tasted like the purple coloring. Then there was the slight tangy, jam flavor in there ... all capped off with a refreshing burst of mint. The chocolate coating was mercifully stronger here, perhaps picking up on the woodsy notes of the raspberry. It was just a terrible mix. I don’t think mint goes well with berries or even citrus (I know, Mojitos are a mystery to me).

They’re not for vegans - there’s milk and eggs in there. There’s no gluten statement on the package but no actual wheat ingredients - proceed with caution.

Related Candies

1. Head to Head: Haviland Thin Mints vs. Maxfield’s Cream Sticks
2. Haviland Dark Chocolate Covered Thin Mints
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Minty Mallows
4. Ritter Sport Peppermint
5. Junior Mints Deluxe
6. York Pinkermint Patties

Here’s a new twist on a classic product. The classic Candy Buttons are a small strip of paper, like a receipt, that has little crunchy sugar dots on them in bright colors.

This new version is amped up in size and has another twist, actual flavors to the candy buttons (the classics may be flavored, but it’s not perceptible). They’re called Candy Sweet Spots and they’re made in China by Greenbrier International, Inc.

The package is big. The strips are 11 inches long and 4.25 inches wide. There are three strips inside, which provides a full 2.4 ounces of candy - I paid a buck for it.

I’ve never seen a package include, perhaps even advertise, the word artificial so much. The name of the candy might actually be Candy Sweet Spots Artificially Flavored. Then at the bottom there’s a little arrow that points up to the candies themselves that also exalts, “Assorted Artificial Fruit Flavors!”

The package goes on to list all of the flavors, right there on top of the actual candies in the see through package. I appreciate the information.

Yes, they are bigger than the traditional paper buttons. For the most part they’re 1/3 to 1/2 of an inch in diameter. The old style buttons are a little less than 1/4 of an inch.

They come in four flavors: Artificial Cherry, Artificial Orange, Artificial Lemon and Artificial Raspberry. There are fifteen Sweet Spots of each flavor on each sheet.

The Sweet Spots are pretty much regularly sized and shaped. The bonus over their traditionally sized cousins is that these come off the paper rather easily. I had no trouble getting them off, no bits of paper stuck to the bottom. But they do leave a little residue of color/candy on the paper (so you can’t reuse the paper for notes or anything).

Cherry (red) is sweet and mild, it has an actual authentic artificial taste to it and even a little note of Red #40.
Orange (orange) is sweet and mild and has a hint of actual orange flavor.
Lemon (yellow) is barely different from orange, except that it tastes like stale lemon pound cake.
Raspberry (blue) is ghastly, like the syrupy and flat stuff at the bottom of a can of grape soda. Yes, it tastes more like grape than raspberry.

They’re really not that good as candy, but as something to amuse a small child for a while, they’re okay. They’re also made in China and contain gelatin and artificial flavors and colors.

I would say that they’re a good accent item, but the original Candy Buttons are too. You can peel them off the paper and put them on a decorated cake or cupcake, which is especially useful if you just want to do a plain uncolored frosting and not have to mix anything else. (And easy for kids to do.) Unless you’re looking for something in a larger scale, I’d say move along to some candy that’s actually good. But if you can’t resist the look of these, well, the price is good and the quality of the colors makes them at least a good deal as decorations. Other party ideas include hanging a strip on the wall to make “lickable wallpaper” or as an accent behind a candy buffet.

There’s another version of these called Mega Candy Buttons which are actually even bigger and are Kosher (so probably don’t have gelatin in them).

Related Candies

1. Peter Rabbit Gummy Candy
2. R.M. Palmer Quax - The Yummy Ducky
3. Big Bite Gummy Bear
4. Junior Fruit Cremes
5. Baby Bottle Pacifier Tarts
6. Bug Jar Candy
7. Soda Can Fizzy Candy