Candy Blog

BREAKING NEWS: The Original Fruits Skittles are no longer original.

The green Skittle, which has always been Lime in the United States (except for a brief replacement in 2001), has been replaced with Green Apple.

I noticed the new packages on shelves last week here in Southern California (but they’re probably rolling out all over the country on different timetables). Haley, a reader, mentioned in the comments on the Darkside Skittles review that Midnight Lime in the Darkside mix is now the new home of the much-maligned citrus.

The Green Apple Skittle is a fine tasting Skittle. It’s a mix of actual apple juice flavor, with that sort of peel note to it and the artificial Jolly Rancher. It has a good mix of tartness and sweetness, but it’s actually less tangy than I would have hoped.

The perfection that was the Original Fruits Skittles is now gone. The best feature of Skittles is their combine-ability. Every flavor went with every other flavor in a surprisingly versatile way.

Strawberry & Lime was a daiquiri. Lemon & Lime was a soda. Grape & Lime was a great fruit punch. Orange & Lime was a citrus cooler.

As nice as Green Apple is, it doesn’t play well with others. It’s too head strong. Green Apple and Grape is a wreck. Green Apple and Lemon is passable, but only because Lemon is making up for Apple’s failings. Green Apple and Strawberry is a battle in my mouth, the floral notes of the berry are quite strong, but the plastic note of the Green Apple just steamrolls it. Green Apple and Orange is, well, just fine.

Reaction on Facebook, since I’ve been glancing at the page, isn’t generally positive. More than half of the new messages posted there are negative about the Green Apple (the other posts are general comments with only one I saw that was positive about the flavor).

I’m not sure if this is a publicity stunt and Wrigley’s is planning for a backlash and then will, with much fanfare, return Lime ... or if it’s really a sign of the times, that Lime has had its day, that it’s a 20th century fruit living in a 21st century candy bag. This was mostly an American phenomenon, anyway, Australia went Green Apple more than 10 years ago.

For me, this ruins Skittles perfection. I liked every single flavor in the package. I would eat them all, sure I would rank them but I didn’t pick around a certain flavor. (I give the cherry Starburst away instead of eating them myself.) I still like Skittles ... but I’m far less likely to buy them with the new flavor swap.

Note: The Easter Pastel Skittles still have Lime for 2013.

Related Candies

1. Skittles Darkside
2. Skittles Crazy Sours (Europe)
3. New Flavors: Skittles Sour & Wonka Runts
4. Skittles from the UK
5. Skittles (Fruits, Wild Berry, Tropical, Smoothies & Sour)
6. What Made Hershey’s Want to Change Chocolate?

Trader Joe’s rarely takes a breather in their new product introductions. If I don’t go in for a few weeks, I might miss its appearance on the New at Trader Joe’s shelves only to stumble on it in the regular rotation. This was the case with the new Trader Joe’s PB&J Milk Chocolate Bar . The bar is found at the check out stands, in my case, mixed in with the Speculoos Bars.

The bar is simply a milk chocolate bar with creamy peanut butter and tart raspberry jelly.

The bar is about 5 inches long and 1.25 inches wide. It’s a nicely sized portion, at 1.75 ounces though the calorie count is a bit high since it’s so fatty - 230 calories for the bar or if you’d like to compare it to others I’ve reviewed, it’s 160 calories per ounce.

There’s no statement about the origin or sourcing of the chocolate, but some of the ingredients are organic like the palm oil in the peanut butter filling and some of the sugar.

The bar looks very simple. There are six segments, each filled with a base of peanut butter and topped with a syrupy raspberry jelly.

The milk chocolate is quite dark and has a smoky flavor to it. It’s smooth and has an excellent silky melt and strong flavor of its own, however, the overriding scent of the bar is peanut butter. Once I bit into a segment, though, the raspberry flavors were far more evident. The whole thing really was like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The peanut butter is smooth, it has a dark roasted flavor with a hint of bitterness to it. There’s also a fair bit of salt, 60 mg for the whole bar, considering how much actual peanut butter is in there, I feel like it’s a lot but not over-salted.The jelly itself is a little runny. The best effect for the bar is to bite the segments, to get the smell of the berries, but that just makes the goo run. The raspberry is smooth, not at all grainy, it’s sweet but has a tartness to it. There are no seeds, but the flavor of the seeds, that woodsy green note is there.

For a buck, it’s a great bar. It’s different from anything else you can get in this price range and the ingredients are top of the line. The profile is less sweet than most other candy bars, which is refreshing.

There are no preservatives or artificial colors/flavors. It contains milk, soy and peanuts and may contain traces of wheat, eggs and/or tree nuts. It’s Kosher and made in Canada.

Related Candies

1. Annabelle’s Abba-Zaba Strawberry Peanut Butter
2. Baron Milk Chocolate PB&Js
3. Trader Joe’s Les Chocolats Belgique (Belgian Bars): Caramel, Chocolate Buttercream & Speculoos
4. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
5. Madelaine Duets
6. Trader Joe’s Classic Chocolate Bars
7. Trader Joe’s PB & J Bar

Pictured are Beer Chocolates & Caramels from Ethel M. The company is the boxed chocolate division of Mars, they’re made in Henderson, Nevada and sold at their stores in Las Veagas. (You can also order on the internet.)

I visited their factory store years ago when I was in Las Vegas, which also features an amazing cactus garden adjacent. I recommend getting a hot chocolate and walking around (weather permitting ... otherwise some sort of cold drink).

The original Abba-Zaba bar has been around since the 1920s. It’s a simple construction, a ribbon of thick peanut butter inside a chewy vanilla taffy.

Annabelle’s, the California company that now makes Abba-Zabas came out with a new flavor last year, the Abba-Zaba Strawberry & Peanut Butter. The little starburst on the side of the package says “PB&J with real peanut butter.”

The color of the package is extraordinary. The regular flavor is taxi-cab yellow and black ... for strawberry they went magenta and black. It looks like nothing else on the shelves.

I’m not a huge consumer of Abba-Zaba, I’m more of a Look or Big Hunk fan, as the Annabelle’s bars go. The concept is strong, but the flavor profiles & textures are just a little off for my tastes.

The Strawberry Abba-Zaba has a fruity taffy outside. It’s sweet, though not sickeningly. The bar is best if you smack it on the edge of a table before you open it to break it into easy to eat pieces. The taffy is flavored only with the scent of strawberries, it’s not a tangy taffy. So the idea of getting the flavor of a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich is a little off ... because it doesn’t taste like jam. It’s more like a strawberry cake - all sweetness and not tart. The chew is good, not too tough, it’s soft and combines well with the peanut butter center. The peanut butter is smooth and creamy, but lacking a big salty punch or enough texture to differentiate it well from the taffy when it’s chewed together. I like the graininess of peanut butter in candies like Mary Janes.

Overall, it’s not my thing. It’s different ... but I’d be more inclined to go for a honey taffy or maybe even Banana if it was just going to be sweet.

Related Candies

1. Baron Milk Chocolate PB&Js
2. Mary Jane & Mary Jane Wicked Mix
3. Madelaine Duets
4. Look! and Big Hunk
5. Abba Zaba

Brach’s Ice Cream Conversation Hearts provide a conceptually different choice in the area of conversation candies. They’re flavored like ice cream, which is to say that they’re more mainstream than the original spice inspired flavors that Necco used to produce.

When I go to the store and browse ice cream flavors, the tops on my list of consideration go something like this (not necessarily in order): chocolate, coffee, mint chocolate chip, butter pecan, peanut butter cup and then maybe vanilla. I can’t remember the last time I bought strawberry ice cream (though I buy strawberry sorbet rather often) and orange sherbet is so far off my list of viable flavors, I can’t even recall seeing it in stores.

Strawberry (pink) was bitter and only a vague floral hint of berry. Mostly bitter from the food coloring.

Cherry (same shade of pink) was bitter and sweet with only a faint cherry flavoring note. Not tartness, just sweet. I’m still not convinced that there was any difference, except strawberry seemed even more bitter.

I had to take a break at this point because of the bitterness. A bit of water. Some crackers. I don’t know why I started with pink.

Vanilla (white) was expected to be flavorless, but actually does have a pleasant vanilla note to it. It’s like a marshmallow flavor. Really the only one I picked through assortment to eat. But it was really that I was actively avoiding nearly every other piece.

Chocolate was just horrible. Worse than the pink candies, because it was so lacking in chocolate and ended up tasting like a musty basement. You can tell just by looking at it that it can’t taste like chocolate, it’s not brown.

Orange was mild and did remind me of orange sherbet, except for the fact that it was missing that juice tartness. So it was more like an orange chapstick.

Now that I’ve tried their take on the classic ice cream flavors, I have no interest in their take on something more complex like butter pecan or mint chocolate chip. It’s best they failed at the easy stuff so I don’t get my hopes up.

Brach’s also has Heartlines Classic Conversation Hearts (I reviewed them when they were called small conversation hearts) on the shelves again this year. They’re better than the classic Necco (which are achingly hard to find) but still, not quite right.

Taken as a non-toxic and cheap decoration, there’s little better than conversation hearts. I paid only $2.50 for a full pound. Even if no one eats them from this cute jar on my desk, it was an inexpensive way to look like I’m observing the holiday. If you’re not eating them, it doesn’t matter which version you pick up. Choose based on the color combos, the sayings on them, or where they’re made. (These are made in Argentina.) There’s little point in choosing based on flavor.

Related Candies

1. Brach’s Conversation Hearts
2. Marich Black Heart Licorice
3. Necco Conversation Hearts (Sweethearts) 2010
4. Jelly Belly for Valentine’s Day
5. See’s Cinnamon (Hearts & Lollypops)
6. Gobstopper Heart Breakers
7. SweeTart Hearts