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Small Foods Index
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Written by staff
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Burger King
You’ve probably been asking yourself, “Aren’t chicken fries a crime against God and nature both?” The answer is yes.
Sure, crossing French Fries and chicken fingers is a marketing dream,
but they taste like butt—dry, sandy, skinny butt. They taste like
mediocre frozen food, with a little extra cardboard flavor.
Since chicken fries aren’t as good as chicken fingers, and
chicken fingers aren’t as good as fried chicken, and fast-food fried
chicken isn’t as good as actually eating a meal cooked by an actual
human being, it makes you wonder—how did we get here, exactly?
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Written by staff
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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.
Colored brown and white like coconuts and with a few green ones
mixed in because.... well, you know... they’re a delicious treat that
seems like more than a novelty. Touted as a limited edition, we hope
they change their mind and keep making these.
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Written by staff
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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.)
Spicy gravy, melted curd cheese and hot, fresh french fries make
Gilley’s poutine a formidable and fabulous food. Portsmouth may be a
long way from the native poutine breeding grounds of Canada, but you
wouldn’t know it from this dish, which can warm your soul on any rainy
day or dark night.
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Written by staff
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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.
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Written by staff
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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!
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Written by staff
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(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.
They just don’t know what they’re missing.
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Written by Dave Karlotski
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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.
While they’re not going to replace the classic M&Ms, they’re
not meant to, but they do offer a delightful variation on a familiar
treat, and that sort of momentary diversion alone can be part of what
makes for a great snack.
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Written by staff
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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.)
“Retro” would have been a better description, as “throwback”
makes one think of something you wouldn’t want, but the drinks
themselves are heart-swelling, bringing back memories of pom-poms on
roller skates and feathered hair clips. The most immediate difference
is less carbonation. Gone are the aggressive attack-your-nasal-cavities
bubbles, replaced with a calmer, smoother syrup. The Pepsi has a warm,
friendly taste, like a mud puddle in the Garden of Eden, and the
Mountain Dew is clearer and nowhere near as sickly-sweet. Mmm...
nostalgia.
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Written by staff writer
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Masterfoods USA
This is a confounding product: these
new Skittles look just like regular Skittles (which always looked just
like M&Ms anyway), but instead of being edible candy, they’re gum.
So they look and feel like regular Skittles, which you’d chew and
swallow, but whoah, hold on there! Don’t swallow these! They’ll ball up
in your stomach with all the other gum you’ve accidentally swallowed in
your life, and then you’ll need surgery to have the giant ball of
undigested gum removed.
It would be one thing if the flavor were novel, but they just taste
like fruity gum—disguised as an identical candy—whose form was copied
from another candy originally.... whatever.
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Written by staff writer
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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?
But
we are not without a sense of fun. Unfortunately, if you choose to take
“The Quest” you’ll find out that they taste like lime, so it’s neither
a new flavor, a mystery flavor, nor a good flavor.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Take a minute. Read that first line again if you have to. Study
the picture. It’s ok, we’ll still be here. Savor this moment—you’ll
never have another like it in your lifetime. In a thousand years of
satire, in a hundred thousand comedy skits, no-one could ever make this
up. It’s as if we stand at a crossroads: on our left is Bizarro World,
on our right is The Twilight Zone, behind us is yesterday and straight
ahead is clam beer.
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Written by Liberty Hardy
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Robert's American Gourmet
If you were to stop and think
for a moment about an actual pirate’s booty, you would be turned off
the thought of food for good. But in this instance, the booty in
question is actually a rice and corn product made to look like popcorn.
And it is a miracle for your mouth. It’s so soft and fluffy, it’s as if
actual wisps of air have been captured and sprinkled with delicious
cheese. It’s all organic, and it’s not actually popped corn, so there
are none of those nasty kernel bits that get buried in your gums like
sharks’ teeth. But beware the bottom of the bag and the cheese powder
hidden in the corner like sunken treasure... if one tips the bag up to
get the last bits, the full-on blast of cheesy deliciousness can induce
loss of consciousness.
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Written by Liberty Hardy
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These little squares are delicious. With their minty tingle, they taste
like chocolate kissed by a Christmas decoration. According to the Chimp
Mints' website, the "endangered species" part of the name refers to the
fact that they donate "10% of net profits to help support species,
habitat and humanity." But we enjoy eating them more when we imagine
they're really made out of an actual endangered species.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Four stars for flavor and texture, minus 3 points for silly marketing.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
It's a nice minty treat, but there is very little left of the 3
Musketeers in it—in a real 3 Musketeers, there's a fullness to the
flavor, and an almost gamey aftertaste, both of which are satisfying in
a way the mint stepchild is not. 3 Musketeers is really just a name
slapped on this new, unrelated candy.
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Written by staff writer
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Mars, Incoporated
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.
Since it’s not a Snickers and it has no pumpkin flavor, then the
one defining characteristic of the Snickers Pumpkin Creme is
disappointment.
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Written by staff writer
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The Hershey Company
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.
True to modern marketing form, “Marsmallow Pumpkin” is just an empty name, signifying nothing at all. Feh.
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Written by staff writer
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New England Confectionery Company
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.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Satin-sheen dark milk chocolate in an elegantly thin bar, the
surface of the bar smooth and unbroken, with no hint of pork. Bite
down, though, and bits of delicious bacon are released, each crunch
like a tiny breakfast star in a rich chocolate sky. Pinprick moments of
saltiness burst across the deeper field of sweetness, burst and then
fall, dissolve, fade.
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Written by staff writer
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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!
Sweet, wonderful blueberry milk, not made by milking blueberries
but rather by milking special cows that—actually, we have no idea how
they make it, but it’s delicious. Remember at the bottom of a bowl of
sugar cereal, the sweet, sweet milk that would collect there, infused
with whatever Captain-Count-Lucky-Boo-Frostedness had leeched out of
the cereal? The best part of the bowl, darn it, now in a bottle! That's
what blueberry milk tastes like.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Make no bones about it (usually), this is a pickled sausage, and
wholly unashamed of it. It’s not a meal, it may not entirely be food,
and it’s a hell of a caustic snack. Really, the only reason to buy one
is if you’re standing at the checkout counter and suddenly you think,
“Uh, I should get something to eat with this beer.”
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Written by Paul Foster
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Idaho Candy Company, Boise, Idaho
Enjoying a bit of
celebrity after having been featured on the Food Network’s “Unwrapped,”
the Idaho Spud Bar is a chocolate-marshmallow creation inspired by … a
potato? First manufactured in 1918, the Idaho Spud Bar is a blob of
vaguely cocoa marshmallow covered with a layer of chocolate and then
sprinkled with coconut, resulting in a flavor as odd as its name.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Winter is coming, and we want to see hot chocolate in a bowl
served locally. Then we want to see wine in the soda machines and
frogs’ legs at KFC.
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Written by staff writer
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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?
It does not mean this is an exotic new candy hybrid concocted in
the secret Nabisco candy labs. It does mean this is an adequate
chocolate wafer stick, covered in chocolate, with the Oreo name stamped
on it by a team of soulless marketing people. It really doesn’t taste
like an Oreo at all, nor does it capture any of the texture or
experience of eating that beloved bicolor junkfood cookie—with the
exception of that muddy feeling in your mouth after eating one, like
you’re going to have to brush your teeth extra-hard to scrub out the
Oreo-dirt; that, the ChocoStix re-creates well.
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Written by staff writer
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S&S Candies
Just when you think there's nothing new
under the sun—well, it turns out you’re right. While stacking an Oreo
on top of a peanut butter cup might be bold, and then stacking a
chocolate chip cookie on top of another peanut butter cup might be even
bolder, taking a third peanut butter cup and sprinkling it with
M&Ms and packaging the whole thing as a candy bar is just an
affront to the gods—and with such familiar parts, it’s hard to call it
innovation, either.
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Written by staff writer
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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.
Given that the chalky taste of pureed Power Bar is expected,
Muscle Milk is really quite good, and satisfying. The Chocolate Mint
version gives the impression of a shake made from some sort of
reconstituted Thin Mint paste—which is to say, it’s delicious!
It even comes in a manly, grab-able, chuggable 17-oz carton which makes
you feel like you bought it at a special muscle store instead of the
local Gas-n-Sip.
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Written by Staff
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Chase Candy Co., St. Joseph, Missouri
When a simple
chocolate-covered cherry isn't enough for you, you'd be lucky if you
found a Cherry Mash. Made in Missouri, this cherry monster has been in
production since 1918. It’s huge, maybe five or six times the size of a
plain old chocolate cherry, a big, lumpy, indelicate chocolate
meterorite.
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Written by Staff
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Pearson’s Candy Co., St. Paul, Minnesota
We were
excited about Pearson’s Milk Chocolate Vanilla Bun. Would it be shaped
like a cinnamon bun? What does milk chocolate vanilla taste like? Does
the manufacturer make other pastry-shaped candy bars? How did they
think of such a thing?
The answer to all of these questions is “no.”
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Written by staff
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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.
The thick chocolate cup is textured with almond bits and
itty-bitty coconut fronds, giving it just the tiniest hint of a crunch,
and the creamy center is smooth, almost Cadbury Creme Egg-smooth, like
white treasure.
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Written by staff
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Annabelle Candy Company
Hayward, Ca
This is a spongy candy bar. Like trying to build
a house on a marsh, building a candy bar on marshmallow shows
questionable judgement. The cashews are little more than a fine
particle sprinkle, and the chocolate is thin and treacherous. Really,
there's nothing rocky about it.
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Written by staff
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The Atkinson Candy Co., Lufkin, Texas
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.
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Written by staff
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Sitting on the shelf next to the regular Diet Coke is a bottle with a
bright teal cap and a fluorescent yellow sticker that reads “New Item.”
So you think to yourself, “If I’m already planning on having a Diet
Coke, why not go for the one with vitamins and minerals?” The label on
a 20-ounce bottle says it will give you 30-45 percent of your daily
value of niacin, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, magnesium and zinc.
Fantastic! It will help you fight off a cold while eating the lining of
your stomach!
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Written by staff
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If you were thinking that you liked the taste of Butterfingers but
find them dauntingly heavy and dense, then Nestle Butterfinger Stixx
presents a delightful alternative. Each stixx (Stix? Stik? Pokey?) is
light and pleasant, containing Butterfinger-flavored "Candy Crème"
injected into a wafer tube and then covered in chocolate. It tastes
just like a Butterfinger, but without the experience of having the
disturbing, oily orange Butterfinger flake compacted into your teeth
all afternoon.
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Written by staff
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Ritz Chips are Ritz Crackers re-imagined as “chips.” While we generally frown on such brand recycling, the result is yummy.
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Written by staff writer
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Java Juice is weird: .5 oz. of high-strength coffee extract fluid in a
slim little bag, ingredients just coffee and water. The mind
reels—surely you can’t make holy coffee by drizzling black fluid into
tapwater?! Surely coffee must be “brewed” in a quasi-mystical
transformation!
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Written by staff
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Candy donuts?! Mama mia!
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Written by staff
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Dove’s new cookies tumble out of their layers of wasteful packaging
like babushka dolls, the 15 tiny cookies sealed in 3 airy plastic tubs
stacked inside an ample squarish box.
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Written by staff
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The Cool Dog—manufactured by Cool Dog, Inc., of Shirley, Mass.—is creamy, yummy, strange and fun.
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Written by staff
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In marketing, consistency is very important—so if you’re going to have
a black-cherry-French-vanilla-diet-cola called “Jazz,” then the label
should accurately reflect the confusion and nausea that these words
elicit. Pepsi’s “jazz” label does just that, depicting a torrent of
brown effluent cascading into a foamy cesspool full of red cherries,
all topped with a tacky purple ribbon swirling across the front and the
double logo of “Diet Pepsi” and “Jazz” puzzlingly intermingled.
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Written by staff writer
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The candy industry will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid having a
new idea, and Hershey’s Kissables is a great example of that—tiny
Hershey’s Kisses with colorful M&M candy coatings. Cute as a button!
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Written by staff writer
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For 7-Eleven, the appeal of tube-shaped foods is clear—like hot dogs
and sausages, tube-shaped foods can rotate endlessly on the rollers
under the heat lamps, remaining ever-warm without actually cooking. The
appeal to the consumer is less clear.
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Written by staff
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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.”
Although I’ve found this to be a great rule of thumb, thank
heavens it doesn’t apply to Ben & Jerry’s Chunkey Monkey Milkshake,
which is delicious and refreshing, even if there are only 8 tiny ounces
of it!
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Written by staff
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The Starbucks Chocolate Chocolate Cupcake is a good cupcake, rich and moist and chocolatey, mmm-mmm!
But
no chain store baked good could ever live up to the promise made by
that delightfully dark, curly head of chocolate shavings. Look at it!
It’s so dear! Like a fuzzy Angora bunny or a soft chinchilla, this
cupcake’s darling looks are a brilliant bit of marketing not really
supported by what’s inside.
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