Pumped

Today, while I was walking through the grocery store, a Halloween treat caught my eye. Literally. (It was hanging at head level as I turned a sharp corner.)

You know Jelly Belly as a “gourmet jelly bean.” (You also may know the depressing story about the founder of Jelly Belly.) But JB has also developed various other candy products. And today we’ll be reviewing the Jelly Belly Pumpkins Mellocreme Candy.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Aren’t Mellocremes those chewy, waxy, pumpkin-shaped candies that Brachs puts out every Halloween? You know, the ones that dislodge countless tooth fillings annually? Well, what you’re thinking of are Mellowcremes, which is a registered trademark of Brachs. Mellocremes (without the W, and without the trademark) is JB’s answer to your as-yet-undisturbed dental work.

So, how do these new, fancy candies stack up against the staid, old-fashioned Brachs? Let’s find out…

1.Packaging. I have to say, I’m not impressed. The package has the familiar Jelly Belly logo, and a picture of three of the pumpkin-shaped candies. Below this is a clear window, where you can see the actual candies in all their corn-syrup-laden glory. There’s no other decoration to speak of: No Halloween theme, no skeletons, no bats. Maybe JB wasn’t going for Halloween, but rather a fall theme. But then you’d expect autumn leaves or something like that. Overall, it’s not a very interesting package. 1 point.

2. Appearance of the Treat. JB has apparently tried to make these candies look like pumpkins. The orange dye (which, according to the packaging, is actually a combination of yellow #5, red #3, and blue #1) looks convincing enough. They even colored the stem green. On the other hand, each stem appears to have been painted by the Hulk using a paint roller. Doesn’t anyone take pride in their craft anymore? The picture below compares the JB “mellocreme” with the Brachs OG version. The Brachs candy is larger, and seems to look more like a pumpkin than the JB candy, which resembles an orange volcano spewing green lava. But Brachs doesn’t seem to have had much better luck in the stem-painting department. Overall, I give the JB candy 1 point.

3. Taste. Here’s where I think Jelly Belly really blew it. The company is legendary for precisely capturing the flavor of various distinctive foods–hot buttered popcorn, plums, jalapenos, cotton candy…) and replicating those flavors in a jelly bean. It’s very, very impressive. So here they’ve created a pumpkin-shaped candy, which they call “pumpkins,” and they taste like…..orange. Seriously. WTF? Now, the Brachs Mellowcremes (TM) admittedly don’t really taste like any identifiable food, which I think is the point. They just taste like Mellowcremes (TM). And that’s fine. They are good at being what they are, which is a gooey, waxy, pumpkin-shaped blob with an inoffensive, sui generis taste. But here comes Jelly Belly, with their fancy-pants reputation for palate verite, and their big improvement on the old, reliable Mellowcreme (TM) is to make it taste like orange. Zero points.

4.Value. A 3 ounce bag of these “pumpkins” set me back $1.69 at my local grocery store. At the same store, I spent $1.50 on an 11 ounce bag of Brachs Mellowcremes (TM). You do the math. Zero points.

Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 2 points out of 12, which qualifies as a Nasty TRICK.