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!