Mars Snackfood US, LLC

Other than little umbrellas and palm trees stamped on some of the shells, Coconut M&M’s look and feel just like regular M&M’s—same familiar shell, same chocolate center—but they taste fabulously different. Like tiny Mounds fetuses, the Coconut M&M’s perfectly capture the joy of coconut and chocolate blended together.

Gilley’s PM Lunch

What seems outlandish at first reveals itself as brilliant through an inevitable chain of logic: the only thing better than french fries is french fries with cheese (a known fact); the only thing better than french fries with cheese is french fries with cheese and gravy—poutine! (There is a further progression, which involves adding bacon.)

Reed's, Inc.

How can you not immediately fall for a beverage that lists Szechuan Peony Root as its third ingredient? Cassia Bark, Raw Cane Sugar, Nutmeg, Oils of Lemon, Cloves, oo la la! It is, in fact, written into our charter here at the Small Foods Laboratories to consume all the Szechuan Peony Root-based snacks we can.

After the initial thrill of discovery, though, reality sets back in. China Cola is a bit flat and a bit heavy, more like a thin ginger beer than a cola. It’s not bad, but it’s not delicious either, not tremendously fun. It’s a solid, healthy cola alternative (with Szechuan Peony Root!) for those who prefer to drink their sodas from the strange springs along the road less traveled.
 

The Ceres Bakery egg wrap is the finest kind of fast food: fresh, delicious, and made from real stuff by real people. It changes from day to day, sometimes with more mushrooms, or broccoli, or red peppers, and some optional meats as well, but the heavenly simplicity of it is unwavering—eggy, cheesy goodness all wrapped up in a little breakfast football. Grab it and go long!

It may, in fact, be our ideal food.  It has no bones or gristle or other inedible parts; it’s soft, so you can eat it even if you don’t have teeth or are too lazy to eat chewy foods; it’s portable, so you can eat it as you walk; and to top it off, it has a very high cheese-to-mass ratio.
Breakfast-on-the-go, thy name is egg wrap!

(available in bulk at healthy-food stores near you)

O toasted corn! How have we lived so long and never known your delights? Salty, corny, delicious, how can we eat just one double-fistful? How can we stop at one scooper’s worth? One bin? Nay, we cannot!

Be warned, though: although toasted corn is made of all-natural ingredients like corn and salt, we can’t say for sure that it is good for you, because it is also the loudest snack we have ever encountered! We are not kidding when we say that when we chew toasted corn, we cannot hear ourselves think—seriously, we at the Small Foods Laboratory have frequently had to stop chewing our toasted corn in order to finish a thought. The detonation from each crunch goes directly into the skull and is then broadcast both up into the brain and out into the open air, causing passers-by to stop and stare, wondering, perhaps, why you would put firecrackers in your mouth.

Mars Snackfood U.S., Llc.

Despite bewildering packaging featuring some kind of complicated “Transformers” movie tie-in (in the picture, it looks like the M&Ms are covered in trash), Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms are delicious.

The math is hard to deny—peanut butter M&Ms are great, so peanut butter and jelly M&M’s are a good bet too.
They’re the jumbo-sized M&Ms, not the standard slim, so they’re beefy and satisfying. Some of the shells are speckled, which is a nice touch as well.

As American obesity rates continue to soar, the Pepsi company introduces the limited editions Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback. Made closely to the original recipes, they include real sugar, not the high fructose corn syrup and many –ine ending chemicals that pervade their present counterparts. (The ingredient lists on the bottles are now MUCH shorter.)

Masterfoods USA

Frito-Lay, Inc.

You might think you’ve seen it all, but then there’s The Quest: something in a bag with the slogan “Guessing the flavor is just the beginning...”

Yes, it’s a snack with no substance at all, or at least none you’re supposed to be aware of. You’re supposed to buy it without any idea what you’re buying—heck, how do you even know it’s chips and not, say, dried pig ears?

Anheuser-Busch, Inc.

Chelada is an alcoholic beverage produced by Anheuser-Busch which combines Budweiser, the king of beers, with Clamato, a drink made from tomato juice and clams.

The Hershey Company

The Reese's Whipps is a chocolate shell over a peanut butter sheath, filled with soft nougat. It has the classic Reese's peanut butter flavor familiar to fans of their Cups and Pieces, slightly tangy and softly gritty.

Texture is one of the triumphs of the Reese's Whipps, as all its components are soft, yet the whole turns out to be chewy and satisfying, as if a nougat pillow were wrapped in a cozy peanut butter blanket, then snugly tucked in with a chocolate comforter.
The name, though, is puzzling. Unlike many new candy bars which, when unwrapped, turn out to actually be two smaller bars packaged together, the name "Reese's Whipps" is clearly plural, yet there's just one bar. It's a substantial bar and there's no shame in that, but the name makes us look around for more. We're not quite sure what a "whipps," is—especially if it doesn't involve nitrous oxide—but we know it's plural.

Mars, Incorporated

A mint-flavored 3 Musketeers is not a bad idea. Minty and fluffy is an uncommon combination, and 3 Musketeers is a venerable bar that hasn't seen much experimentation.

The resulting flavor is identical to a York peppermint Patty, but with a much lighter, airier texture. The chocolate skin is dark and thin, and the minty fluff is bright white.

Next up in our ongoing series of exposés on radically misleading Halloween-themed candy is the Snickers Creme Pumpkin. “Pumpkin creme in a Snickers!” you exclaim. “How novel! What might that taste like?”

We don’t know, and neither will you—there is no pumpkin creme, or pumpkin flavor of any kind, in this candy. As near as we can tell, the “creme” designation is meant to refer to the gooey caramel-nut puree inside the candy, as it’s not a normal Snickers inside either; instead of peanuts and a solid bar you can bite down on, its innards are a nondescript fluid, not unlike the organless goo inside a bug.

Halloween is, in part, a candy holiday: buckets and bags of candy, candy of all shapes and sizes and colors, some seasonal and some tried-and-true. It’s a time when we get to try new confections that we might not be familiar with simply because they ended up in our sack.

But just because we’ll try anything at Halloween, that doesn’t excuse laziness from the candy companies. A marshmallow pumpkin sounds like a grand idea, until you discover that there’s nothing remotely pumpkin about it—it’s just chocolate-covered marshmallow. They didn’t even bother to color the marshmallow orange.

Peanuts and peanut butter flavor are a staple of the candy industry, but there is one quiet giant that has stood above them for almost a century, and she has the face of a little girl: Mary Jane.

The Mary Jane isn't just peanut-flavored; rather, it tastes, feels and looks like the candy reincarnation of an actual peanut. It's peanut sized, in a pale yellow wrapper, and inside it's tan and tender and almost earthy—eat one with your eyes closed and you can feel the sun of the heartland on your face, nearly smell the hay and hear the slow rustle of grasshoppers. It makes you think about more than the generic one-note "peanut" flavor we're used to, making you contemplate the whole peanut with its soft, airy shell, its funny, quirky shape, the mix of sun-dry and nut-oily. It makes you think about what it means to be a peanut, the funny little legume that no one respects.

Vosges Haut-Chocolat

Sometimes you eat a snack that changes everything, a snack that stops you cold and makes you realize that nothing is ever going to be the same.

Harris Dairy Farm

For an entire generation, having blue milk at breakfast has always been just an unreachable Tattooine heat dream, but no more. From nearby Dayton, Maine—not far, far away at all—comes blueberry milk!

ConAgra Foods

It’s the first thing on the label, underneath the name:

Made with pork, chicken and beef. Artficially colored. Pickled in artificially colored vinegar pickle.

Idaho Candy Company, Boise, Idaho

During a recent trip to Quebec, The Small Foods Index was delighted to discover hot chocolate served in a bowl! Normally wary of simple repackaging, in this case we were entirely entertained—sure,  the hot chocolate itself was from a powder, but it was in a bowl! One could spoon it up like a chocolate meal, or pick up the bowl and slurp it down like candied miso soup.

Nabisco Oreo ChocoStix is another example of the brand recycling common to so many modern food-like products: here’s a new Oreo product, we’re told, even though it’s not a, you know, Oreo. So, what does that mean?

S&S Candies

Chocolate Mint Muscle Milk has the slightly chalky aftertaste common to many protein bars and protein shakes, leading us to conclude that protein does, in fact, taste chalky.

Chase Candy Co., St. Joseph, Missouri

Pearson’s Candy Co., St. Paul, Minnesota

Adams & Brooks, Inc., Los Angeles, California

The Cup-O-Gold comes in a little paper skirt like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, but on the Cup-O-Gold it seems different ... more like a kilt. This is a big, bold snack, a satisfying adventure of a candy bar.

Annabelle Candy Company
Hayward, Ca

Bright orange and covered in fuzz—what could be inside the Chick-O-Stick? What, o what could it be?!

Initial hopes that there might be chicken involved are dashed after a quick scan of the label: “Crunchy Peanut Buttter and Toasted Coconut Candy.” Mmmm ... sounds edible!

The Chick-O-Stick is sweet and crunchy and fun, and very similar in its fundamental flavor to the inside of a Butterfinger, as well as having that same mega-orange color. Our sample stick was a little hard, but to be fair it had been in the car a while.

My mother always said, “Beware of novelty beverages packaged in tiny bottles/cans. Just because they’re expensive doesn’t mean they’re not sickening.”

The Starbucks Chocolate Chocolate Cupcake is a good cupcake, rich and moist and chocolatey, mmm-mmm!