Candy Blog

Mars has introduced a limited edition, limited distribution of a new variety of M&Ms for Halloween. M&Ms White Chocolate Candy Corn are appearing in WalMart stores exclusively across the United States. Since I’m not able to easily shop at WalMart (really not many in the Los Angeles area), some folks at Mars were kind enough to send me a bag for review.

It’s tempting when I hear about candies like this to write the review before I even get a hold of the candy. That would not only be a horrible disservice to the readers, it’s really unfair to the candy. I’m supposed to have an open mind. Luckily I kept mine open for this one. (In reality, I thought it sounded like a dreadful idea, and I blame the Hershey’s Candy Corn Kisses and Jelly Belly Buttered Popcorn candies for my predisposition.)

The M&Ms are larger than the regular M&Ms Milk Chocolate, though they vary a little bit in size and shape. They’re thicker and have a larger diameter. They come in three colors: white, bright yellow and bright orange. (The orange and yellow are actually different from the standard colors. The orange is darker and not as shiny and the yellow has a matte caste to it and a slightly neon note.)

Mars has marketed White Chocolate M&Ms before, in 2006 they introduced M&Ms Pirate Pearls in conjunction with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Unlike the other limited edition version of Dark Chocolate M&Ms (tie in with Star Wars), they were never added to the regular or seasonal offerings.

Mars has stuck to their Real Chocolate pledge here, it’s real white chocolate made with oodles of cocoa butter (cocoa butter is the second ingredient - sometimes white chocolate products have milk fat before the cocoa butter). There are no other filler oils.

The candies smell a bit like strawberries or cotton candy, very sweet but not in an artificial way. I was fully expecting the liberal use of diacetyl. Happily that was not the case.

Candy Corn M&Ms on the left and classic Milk Chocolate M&Ms on the right

The shells are crunchy and seem thicker than the standard Milk Chocolate variety sports. Some of the shells were cracked, I don’t know if that was because this was sent to me and got shaken up in transit or if they’re particularly vulnerable.

The center is soft and yielding. It’s sweet and buttery smooth, like a well made buttercream frosting. The flavors are only slightly milky, the sweetness is rather clean and again reminds me of Cotton Candy. I was hoping for the honey notes that good Candy Corn has, but this was all a pleasant surprise.

They’re quite rich, both in fat and in sugar, so I found that I couldn’t eat more than about a dozen without feeling a little overwhelmed by the sweetness. Ultimately though I didn’t feel like they rose to the level of an actual Candy Corn flavored candy. Still, they’re nice, and for white chocolate fans who have so few choices for real cocoa butter white chocolate, you might be pleased.

Now I’m waiting for Egg Nog M&Ms .... mmm, nutmeg white chocolate would be dreamy.

One other note I have about this packaging. I noticed on the nutrition panel that they’re giving better information. In the serving size it gives the portion in variety of formats. A serving size is 1.5 ounces, 42 grams or about 1/4 cup. So you really get a sense of how much they mean. The new green what’s inside block also breaks it out very clearly. One portion is 220 calories and 11 grams of total fat (17% DV) and 7 grams of saturated fat (35% DV).

UPDATE 9/11/2012: White Chocolate Candy Corn M&Ms are back for 2012. They’re available in all stores, in both the large bags as well as 1.5 ounce individual serving bags (with a variety of different designs on the front).

Related Candies

1. Eat with your Eyes: Meiji Strawberry Lentils
2. Pumpkin Pie Gourmet Candy Corn
3. Puffy Candy Corn
4. Toffee Flavored Chocolate Covered Candy Corn
5. Halloween Dots: Bat, Candy Corn & Ghost
6. M&Ms Premiums
7. Candy Corn Kisses
8. M&M Pirate Pearls

Name: Angry Birds Fruit Snacks and Gummies
Brand: Healthy Food Brands
Description: The chewy candies are shaped to resemble characters from the Angry Birds video games, and packs feature the games’ logo and graphics. Made with fruit juice, all products are fat-, nut- and gluten-free, and come in cherry, lemon, raspberry, apple, grape and strawberry flavors. Angry Birds Fruit Snacks come in 2.25 and five-ounce peg bags with SRPs of 89 cents and $1.59 while Angry Birds Gummies come in 3.5-ounce theater boxes with a SRP range of $1.29 to $1.69.
Introduction Date: current
Notes: Angry Birds has been devouring your time, now you can devour them. Actually, I appreciate that the shapes are actually of the little characters. I hate it when I get a themed candy that’s just about the packaging, nothing inside is any different from the usual brand.

Name: 3 Musketeers Coconut Bar
Brand: Mars
Description: Send your taste buds to paradise with the sweet taste of new 3 MUSKETEERS Coconut Bar. Coconut flavor has been added to the 3 MUSKETEERS signature light and fluffy chocolate nougat and then wrapped in rich, milk chocolate.
Introduction Date: December 2011
Notes: Mars has already introduced Coconut M&Ms, Coconut Twix and Dove Coconut Cream Eggs (and maybe you can count the Snickers Adventure Bar that had some coconut in it). Sometimes Mars’ innovations feel more systematic. They introduce a version of something with a new flavor, like Cherry M&Ms and then they say, “What else could have cherry in it?” So then we have Cherry 3 Musketeers, and then Cherry Dove Bars and so on. The other flavored center varieties of 3 Musketeers have been interesting, I did appreciate the Coffee one and Raspberry was interesting too. I’m not sure how long we’ll have to wait for the Chili & Lime 3 Musketeers or the Wasabi 3 Musketeers.

Name: M&Ms Mint Dark Chocolate
Brand: Mars
Description: Consumers can add some cool to their crunch with new M&Ms Mint Dark Chocolate Candies. It’s a delicious, new way to experience the colorful, shareable M&Ms bite-sized candy they love, now with cool, refreshing mint combined with creamy dark chocolate and coated in a crunchy candy shell. Mars Chocolate has responded to consumer requests for variety and has shown proven success in adding new flavors to its iconic brands. Mint is a large and growing segment of the chocolate category.
Introduction Date: December 2011
Notes: These may have existed in the distant past and I’m happy to see that they’ll return. (It also appears that the seasonal Milk Chocolate Mint M&Ms will also be back.)

Name:
Brand: Mars
Description: Consumers will experience the chocolate lover’s dream with new SNICKERS 3X Chocolate 2 to Go Bars. Layer after layer offers perfection, with roasted peanuts in chewy, chocolate caramel atop a fluffy chocolate-flavored nougat and covered in creamy milk chocolate.
Introduction Date: December 2011
Notes: I’ve never met someone who likes Snickers that would say that Snickers needs less peanut flavor. I’m not saying that this is going to be a bad bar, but if they only thing that’s still Snickerish are the peanuts, is is not going to go well. But what do I know, the experts at Mars (or their advisers) say, “In consumer testing, this new offering scored as high as the original SNICKERS Bar in overall product liking,1 and 67 percent of consumers said they would “definitely” or “probably” purchase SNICKERS 3X Chocolate Bars.”
A few years ago there was a Triple Chocolate Twix bar, it was chocolate caramel on a chocolate cookie covered in chocolate. So Mars already knows how to do this.
Don’t Miss: Gobble Monkey tried the UK iteration of the Triple Chocolate Mars Bar (really a triple chocolate Milky Way).

Name: Sun Cup Caramel
Brand: Seth Ellis Chocolatier
Description: Seth Ellis is already know for their peanut free Sun Cups, which use sunflower seed butter instead. Now they’re expanding the line to include the new milk chocolate caramel cups. They’re also gluten free, tree nut and peanut free and use
Introduction Date: May 2011
Notes: Caramel Cups. I don’t really get them. Nothing against this one, they’re just not quite my thing. But they’re also gluten free, tree nut and peanut free and use Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate and finally, are Kosher certified.

Name: Sun Cup Mint
Brand: Seth Ellis Chocolatier
Description: Love Dark Chocolate? Love sweet cool peppermint? Then you are going to LOVE Dark Chocolate Mint Sun Cups.
Introduction Date: May 2011
Notes: They’re also gluten free, tree nut and peanut free and use Rainforest Alliance certified chocolate and finally, are Kosher certified. The only real issue I have with them is that they use white chocolate as part of the ingredients list. It’s not really a problem for me, but they had an opportunity to make a vegan product (which is pretty rare in the chocolate/mint fondant world) and kind of missed the boat for our animal-free and dairy-free friends.

Name: Ritter Sport Espresso Bar
Brand: Ritter Sport
Description: Ritter Sport is introducing the new 3.5 oz. Milk Chocolate Espresso Bar, made with robust Arabica coffee. With the coffee sector still being a very “hot” category, this bar should do extremely well.
Introduction Date: unknown
Notes: This bar was introduced over a year ago in Europe. I got to taste it then and I’m eagerly anticipating it showing up on store shelves in North America. The milky flavors are quite strong, but the espresso is wonderfully rich and much more forward than the milky and sweet Cappuccino bar they make. We’re sadly lacking in actual coffee chocolate bars in the United States, this will fill that hole very well.

Name: Red Velvet Cupcake Bites
Brand: Taste of Nature, Inc
Description: A new candy promises the fun of dessert in a bite-sized treat. Red Velvet Cupcake Bites feature a cupcake center, covered in creamy red frosting with a distinctive “red velvety” taste. The bites are a play on Taste of Nature’s Cookie Dough Bites candies.
Introduction Date:
Notes: I really loathe Red Velvet Cake, mostly because it’s just yellow cake with red food coloring in it. (But I do enjoy cream cheese frosting.) This candy has it all wrong, first because the coating (cream cheese frosting) shouldn’t be red, it’s supposed to be white and the center should be red. But whatever, I haven’t actually liked any of the other Cookie Dough Bites innovations anyway (need I remind you of the Cupcake Bites?). So I’ll just leave you with the ingredients to tantalize you .... Ingredients: Confectionery coating (sugar, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, nonfat milk powder, whole milk powder, cocoa powder, FD&C red 40 lake, natural flavor, soy lecithin (an emulsifier) and vanillin (artificial flavoring)) and cupcake bites (wheat flour, sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm kernel, palm, soybean, and cottonseed), corn syrup, fructose, water, palm oil, natural and artificial flavors, soy lecithin, salt and xanthan gum).

images courtesy of the respective manufacturers

Related Candies

1. Candy Tease: Mars 2011 Announcements
2. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2011 Part 2
3. Candy Tease: Sweets & Snacks Expo 2011 Part 1
4. Candy Tease: Nostalgia in 2011
5. Candy Tease- October 2010
6. Candy Tease: Mars 2010

Ritter Sport makes dozens of different chocolate bars. A few are seasonal varieties, such as their new Milk Chocolate with Strawberry Creme which debuted last fall in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. (Some packages feature the pink ribbon, others do not.)

The picture on the front of the package along with the name of the bar gave me most of what I needed to know: Milk chocolate filled with a cream of low fat yogurt, strawberry and crispy rice.

The ingredients don’t quite match up with that description. The first ingredient is sugar, which is fine with me as I fully expect my candy to be mostly sugar. The second ingredient is palm kernel oil. Nowhere in my chocolate, low fat yogurt or crispy rice do I ever expect to find palm kernel oil. So, its dominating presence here is unwelcome but the bar is at least redeemed with its third ingredient, cocoa butter, one of my favorite butters.

The bar is a familiar format for Ritter Sport. It’s 100 grams and comes in a square bar made up of 16 sections (four by four). The recommended portion is six pieces, which of course doesn’t create a whole number of portions. (I found for this review one bar was a portion, which means that it replaced my breakfast calories and all my snack calories for the day.)

The cream inside the bar is a faint pink with spots of actual dried strawberries. In addition, there are little bits of crisped rice. The chocolate outside is sweet and milky, like the Alpine Milk variety (though I’m not certain which version of the many Ritter Sport chocolates they used for this bar). The cream inside is sweet and mostly smooth without being greasy. The crunchies in the cream were interesting, sometimes they were the crisped rice, so they were a little salty and a little malty. But other times they were freeze dried strawberry bits so they were tangy and would soften into a slick reconstituted fruit mush. I liked the different pops of tartness or saltiness to go with the cream and milky chocolate background.

It’s a good quality bar (though not great, since a large portion is palm kernel oil) and is different from other American chocolate offerings. I found it on sale at Target for $1.66 over the weekend. For a 3.5 ounce bar of this it’s a good deal. Other bars are a bit lower in fat and have no palm kernel oil, but this is a limited edition item so it’s not as if I’m going to eat them all year round.

Related Candies

1. Ritter Sport Olympia
2. KitKats: Royal Milk Tea, Ginger Ale, Bubbly Strawberry, Kinako Ohagi & Milk Coffee
3. Ferrara Chocolate Strawberry
4. Limited Edition Strawberried Peanut Butter M&Ms
5. Ritter Sport Peppermint
6. Whoppers Milkshake Strawberry
7. Ritter Sport White Chocolate with Hazelnuts
8. Ritter Sport Capuccino and Rum Trauben Nuss

There are two standard axioms for innovation in candymaking: Making it Bigger Makes it Better and Covering it Chocolate Makes it Gourmet. For the most part they’re true.

Albanese Confectionery didn’t invent the gummi bear and didn’t innovate chocolate covered gummis. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t do it well and possibly better than most other confectioners.

The Milk Chocolate Gummi Bears assortment is interesting, first that they’re pretty big. I can’t say for sure, but the bears seem bigger than the standard, but that could be the chocolate coating messing with my ability to gauge their size. The other interesting thing about the assortment are the flavors of the gummis in the center. Albanese has gone with flavors that complement milk chocolate: Orange, Strawberry/Banana, Raspberry, Marshmallow, Strawberry, Apricot.

Of course you’ll never know which you’re getting when you pick one out, kind of a fruity roulette.

Like all of the Albanese gummis, these were soft and flavorful, quite chewy and smooth. The chocolate coating is thin and sweet with a strong milky flavor. (I know that Albanese uses Wilbur Chocolate for their malted milk balls, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is also Wilbur’s couveture.) The bouncy nature of the gummi goes well with the quick melting chocolate.

Albanese sells their chocolate covered bears for about $6.00 a pound online. Chances are pretty good if you’ve found a candy store that sells individually flavored gummi bears (with an A on their bellies) that also carries chocolate covered bears then you’ve probably seen these. If you’re looking for a chocolate treat that’s not so high in calories, these are a great option. They clock in at only 106 calories per ounce, which is very low for a chocolate coated item. The individual pieces and variations in flavors should make for a lean treat that doesn’t feel like a compromise.

They’re far and away better than the Muddy Bears that come in theater boxes and I prefer them to the Koppers version (but these do have artificial colors in them). Still, the top chocolate covered gummi in my heart are the Japanese Gummy Choco.

Related Candies

1. Candy Source: Albanese Candy Factory
2. Au’some Easter 3-Dees Gummy
3. Big Bite Gummy Bear
4. Albanese Gummi Butterflies
5. Chocolate Covered Gummi Bears
6. Meiji Gummy Choco
7. Krunchy Bears

Abdallah Candies was founded in 1909 by Albert Abdallah in Minneapolis. The company still run by the family using traditional recipes and focusing on classic candy products like caramels, dipped fruit and chocolates.

I picked up an assortment of Abdallah’s Wrapped Caramels while on vacation here in California. They’re cute little two bite pieces that I thought were reasonably priced at 60 cents each.

Their varieties go beyond the typical vanilla, chocolate and nut versions. They offer about a dozen different kinds. They’re wrapped in clear cellophane, which shows of the candy very nicely.

I tried three different varieties:

Vanilla Caramels I started with the classic, as this is the base of the other caramel candies. The color is a pleasing creamy brown. The pull of the caramel was good, stringy without being too tough or grainy. The flavor was sweet with milky notes ... I tend to prefer a little more salt in my caramel these days, but this was still a great classic vanilla caramel.

Pecan Caramel Nougat is, as you can probably tell from the photo, a layer of pecan nougat sandwiched between two layers of the vanilla caramel. The pecans were soft but crunchy with a woodsy maple flavor. The nougat didn’t do much for me in the way of actual flavor (no honey notes) but the chewy and denser texture was interesting compared to the softer, quicker dissolve of the caramel.

I wouldn’t call it a complete win for me, but I loved the addition of the nuts.

Pecan Alligator Caramels are another layered caramel. The top is a chocolate caramel and the bottom is a pecan vanilla caramel. It’s great. It’s soft and chewy, the chocolate gives it a little smoky and salty edge, the nuts are fresh and ample, the caramelized sugar notes are perceptible ... I loved this one. It was a little grainier, could have just been that I ate them last of my little set, so they might have gotten a little humid.

I’m absolutely intrigued by Abdallah now. I want to order more of their candy directly but I’m a little hesitant as I sent them an email with a question on Monday and they still haven’t responded. But their prices are very reasonable. I had no trouble plunking down 60 cents for each of these.

The other items on their website include other caramel and nut combinations called Alligators (completely chocolate dipped nut caramels) and Grizzlies (caramels with whole nuts and dollops of chocolate). The confectioner has a factory store in Burnsville, Minnesota that you can get fresh candy and even watch the factory floor where they dip their chocolates (photos on their facebook page).

Related Candies

1. See’s Double Caramel
2. Trader Joe’s 70% Dark with Caramel and Black Sea Salt
3. Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate Tahitian Vanilla Caramels
4. Eat with your Eyes: Asher’s Salted Caramel
5. Bequet Gourmet Caramels
6. J Morgan Caramels
7. Grandma’s Caramels
8. Cowgirl Chocolates Buckin’ Hot Habanero Caramels