Dead Snacks Munching - Recently Discontinued Items

Why Snacks Fail
The discontinued item shelf at Wal-Mart is a wonderful museum of capitalist failure.  For every sorry-looking, nearing expiration item on the forlorn shelf, there was once a passionate advocate in some company's product-development team.  Each product was test-marketed and polled, each idea had research to support its value, each piece of packaging was created by a design professional and went through iterative testing.  In other words, each of these loser products had seemed a great idea at the time.  Today at the Food Kingdom, we'll see what market failure looks like, what it tastes like, and what lessons may be learned from it.

Behold the gallery of failure, and themes emerge.  Shelf-stable ready-to-eat meals are forever being thrust at the public, but most people like their microwaved meals to be frozen.  Does anyone make that much potato salad?  And it's hard to compete against established brands like Wheat Thins, especially with a lame name like "Thin Wheat".  I mean that's not even trying.

Snack Pack Pudding Bars

Ah, Snack Pack Pudding, that childhood treat.  We were always jealous of the kid beside us who'd found it packed in his lunchbox.  And here, beckoning from the shelf is a product promising to fit that great taste into a dry snack bar.   But that's impossible, because baked goods are not pudding and there is no way to "bake pudding in" to a cookie, cake, or bar.  This false claim has a long history and it's time to put it to rest.  Since the early 80s, cake-mix companies like Pillsbury have tried to claim that their cakes are more moist than others because of "pudding in the mix" but this is nonsensical.  Let's consider what pudding actually is: milk, sugar, flavoring, and corn starch.  That's it.  There's no reason why adding any of those ingredients in any combination would make a cake more moist.  Every cake batter already has some liquid in it.  Cakes already have starch in them, usually in the form of flour, and cake mixes are dry by definition anyway so the only pudding they could contain would be "dried pudding."  There's no there there, it's just empty gimmickry.

Consider this, partisans of the "pudding baked right in" belief: once you bake pudding, it ceases to be pudding.

Now, all of this grumpy talk of pudding being an impossible ingredient in a baked good would be pretty irrelevant if this snack bar actually managed to taste moist anyway.  One technique for making a baked good moist for extended periods is actually the addition of oil, which doesn't evaporate.  Alas, no, these bars are actually drier than most snack bars of their kind.  There's a strong, dark chocolate taste and the meager caramel drizzle is nicely pungent if you like the flavor of artificial butterscotch.  Ultimately though, the dryness is too marked a contrast to the sensations conjured by the promise of pudding.  Besides, your money only gets you six small individually wrapped bars.  Broken promises, unimaginative execution, small portion size, and a dry mouthfeel equal a short shelf life.  Good riddance, Snack Pack Pudding Bars.

Let's consign this bar to the dustbin of history with the simple truth that it tastes just like it looks.

Chili-Nut M&M's

This was always a product with a limited market life unless it had won the three-way contest that Mars set up between it and two other flavors: Honey-Nut and Coffee-Nut.   Coffee-Nut won the right to become a permanent flavor and I recently gave them a very favorable review.  But it's a shame that all three couldn't have survived to be eaten another day.  Just like the coffee-chocolate candies, these capsaicin-spiked chocolates have a grown-up taste; when you bite them, they really bite back.  The chili spice is subtle at first, sounding an earthy base note that darkens the taste of the milk chocolate.  As you eat more (and you will) the heat level gradually builds up until there's a constant drumbeat of pepper nipping at the back of your throat.  These go great with a cup of black coffee in the morning and taste a lot like a boutique chocolate bar that typically retails at five times the price.

This photo does not appreciably exaggerate the intensity of Chili-Nut M&M's colors, and these colors were appropriately chosen, for they convey the fearlessness with which Mars injected real hot-chili flavor into their chocolate.

 Incidentally, it may not be too late for you to try these, even though they're off the retail market.  A good friend of the Food Kingdom recommended them to me a month ago and I was able to score a pack of three for $10 on e-Bay, with shipping included.  If you're curious of what was and what could have been, act quickly and enjoy this window into food industry experimentation.

A&W Root Beer Pop Tarts

Poor A&W.  Once it ruled the root beer world as the unquestioned top brand, but it has since been overtaken by Coca-Cola-owned Barq's, and now its market clout isn't even sufficient to keep a co-branded Pop Tart on the shelves.  I discovered those Pop Tarts at 6AM on a Tuesday morning in a dimly lit corner of the discontinued item shelf at the Chantilly Wal-Mart, waiting for someone to eulogize them, to declare that their existence hadn't been entirely pointless.  Funny thing is, they're not as bad as you would think.

It's easy to be sarcastic about such a seemingly loopy idea.  I mean who wouldn't want to take the refreshing taste of ice-cold, thirst quenching root beer and transform it into a dry, crumbly, gel-paste-filled biscuit with crumbly icing and heat it up in a toaster?  I know, right?  Here's the thing, though.  It helps to think of root beer not as a beverage, but as a flavor.  Though root beer has many flavor components in its blend, the primary flavor is sassafras, a species of deciduous tree whose leaves supply the dominant root beer flavor (so why do they call it "root beer"?).  If you think of sassafras as simply a flavor and not as inextricably bound up in a beverage, your mind opens to the idea of hot, aromatic sassafras as the flavor driver of a warm breakfast pastry.  Consider also that root beer flavored hard candy has a long proud heritage. From this point of view, the concept is no longer crazy.  I actually enjoyed these a lot, so keep an open mind when scouring the remainder shelf for interesting values.

A new flavor no more: hot root beer for breakfast simply didn't excite the masses, yet it proved to be a homey, comfortable-smelling companion during four pleasant taste tests.

I Just Couldn't

I wasn't willing to lay out the funds to subject myself to these, but the pictures say a thousand words and the caption adds a few dozen more.

You can tell from the Farmers' Market-style lettering that Sam's Club Butternut Squash Bisque is truly an artisin-crafted delight.  If you act quickly, there are still four jars left at the Chantilly location.  The rancid-peanut butter color is sure to delight your Thanksgiving guests.  And for dessert, why not treat each of your loved ones to their own "Nature's Child" Pudd'n Pouch? After a third glass of wine, everyone will surely want to slice open the package and get at every last chocolatey remnant.


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Size Matters: Reese's Pieces-Stuffed Cups, Regular vs. Big Cup

The Allure of the Tender Crunch
You see it in the Napoleon.  You see it in Sugar-Creme Wafers; in baklava, in Charms Blow Pops, and in extra-crispy fried chicken.  Humans love the sensation of breaking through a crunchy shell, or through multiple layers of crunch, in order to reach a tender treasure inside.  It may not be the pleasantest task to inquire as to why: perhaps some predatory common ancestor was given an evolutionary edge by enjoying the intermingling of crunchy bones with succulent meat, and one less impediment to high-protein nourishment led to differential reproductive success. Whatever the case may have been, today even vegetarians and vegans can indulge this desire for conflicting textures, and its persistence doubtless explains the appearance on the market of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups stuffed with crunchy Reese's Pieces.  Crucially, these are available in two sizes, the traditional petite size and a fattened up "Big Cup", and we'll discover that this actually produces two very different tastes.

There they stand, clothed in chocolate armor but vulnerable to the inevitable crushing chomp.

Peanut Butter Inside of Peanut Butter?
It's easy enough to accept the appeal of crunchy nuggets inside of peanut-butter cups, but it seems only natural to wonder why the filling should also be peanut-butter based.  Why not chocolate pieces, or crunchy rice, or pretzels?  Isn't peanut butter redundant?  I asked this question myself and it drove me to answer once and for all a question that has always bugged me: is the peanut butter filling inside Reese's Pieces the same as what's inside the peanut butter cup?  They'd always tasted different to me, but I wondered if that was because of the influence of the shell's distinct flavor and texture.  To be sure, the shell would have to be removed and the peanut butter within tasted on its own.  The process of doing this is tasty enough to undertake, albeit a little offputting to describe; the shelled candies just need to be popped into the mouth and gently sucked upon like a fragile hard candy until only tender nibs of peanut filling remain.

The briefest of visual inspections suggests that the filling in Reese's Pieces is distinct from that of their peanut butter cups.  The cup filling is coarse, grainy, even a little sandy.  The contours of the pieces are tight and crisp, their surface smooth and refined, suggesting almost a peanut-flavored white chocolate. And that's basically what they are.

As the photo above shows, the two fillings look very different, and the taste reflects this.  The cup contains a loosely packed peanut-butter fudge, sandy, salty, and nutty, reflecting the copious presence of coarse-ground peanut butter.  The pieces taste more like chocolate, al dente to the first bite 
but gradually softening in the warmth of the mouth and melting away smoothly.  This answers the question of why Reese's would put their pieces inside of their peanut-butter filling.  It introduces yet another texture into the mix, bringing the taste count to four.  First you have the milk chocolate, then peanut-butter filling, then the crunchy shell, and finally the smooth, almost chocolatey pieces.  Wheels within peanut-butter wheels.

Why the Big Cup Wins
This ambitious flavor and texture packing scheme does succeed, but with an important caveat.  If you run out to the drugstore and just pick up the regular-size peanut-butter cups with the pieces inside, you'll be sorely disappointed because there isn't enough room inside a standard-issue peanut-butter cup for all of this interplay of parts to be contained.  Even though the Reese's Pieces are miniaturized for this hybrid candy, they're still too large to easily fit within the chocolate shell, and so you'll find very few whole pieces in the small-size cups. Mainly you get sherds and slivers of shell, but few identifiable remains.  The interior of the normal-size cups looks like a careless archaeological dig of a ransacked city, all tiny scraps and fragments with no intact objects.

The compressed space inside a normally-sized Reese's cup leaves no room for Reese's Pieces to fit, whereas the roomy interior of the big cup allows the different elements to arrange themselves harmoniously.

The Big Cup is much better designed for the task at hand.  Like a practical minivan, it has plenty of room for all the critical passengers.  The peanut-butter filling piles up light and fluffy, the milk chocolate retreats to the outer edges and plays a supporting role while numerous little gems of crunchy, melty peanut-butter candy sit nestled inside, ready for the Mixmaster that is the human mouth to tumble them all together, crunchy meeting creamy, sandy swimming with smooth, as somewhere deep within us, our tree-swinging simian ancestor smiles.

On the left side, you see a very rare occurrence: an intact Reese's Piece within one of the small cups.  On the right, you see that multiple sightings of these full pieces are common in the Big Cup.  You can also see from this cross-sectional view just how dramatic is the texture difference between the smooth and refined filling of the pieces and the almost gravelly filling that's traditionally present in the cups.

Conclusions
Pieces within the cups are a big idea and they require a big canvas for their execution.  These Reese's Pieces-filled Big Cups may cost extra money, but it's go big or go home.

Coffee Nut M&Ms and the Opening of the American Palate

The Tastes of Americans Have Matured
(No, Really)
The past few years have seen a real explosion in the number of new M&Ms flavors on offer: pretzel-filled M&Ms, crispy rice M&Ms, M&Ms flavored with peanut butter, mint, raspberries, almonds, dulce de leche and, if the internet is to be believed, even candy apple and pecan pie.  You might have thought that Mars would be at the point of creative exhaustion, but instead they've struck out in a pleasingly complex and adult direction with their new Coffee Nut M&Ms.

Who knows how they will fare in the kiddie market?  After all, children have their own laptops and tablets, so perhaps they have a taste for strong-brewed coffee too.  But it's hard not to think of these as aimed squarely at the adult professional.

This new coffee nut flavor comes to us by virtue of having won a consumer preference contest, beating out two other peanut-based candidates, Honey Nut and Chili Nut.  That either Coffee Nut or Chili Nut were viable candidates is a reflection of the growing sophistication of consumer preferences.  Two decades ago, neither flavor would likely have been possible.  Back then, mild, inoffensive milk chocolate dominated the American market, and pairing chocolate with assertive flavors like dark-roasted coffee or spicy chilis would have seemed too risky.  But two decades of Starbucks expansion has created a taste for the burnt and bitter notes of dark-roasted beans. Plus, the growth of boutique chocolates with high cacao content and intense flavor pairings have given large manufacturers the courage to experiment with high odds of success.

The flavorless shells (yes, I sucked on 'em just to be sure) come in three themed colors—call them "dark espresso", "just enough creamer", and "accident with the CoffeeMate."

Layers of Flavor and Texture
It's really striking how subtle and complicated the flavors and textures in these candies are.  Once the teeth puncture the thin shell of porcelained sugar, the palate is immediately saturated with the bittersweet and burnt notes of whole coffee beans.  I had to do a quick double check of the ingredient list to make sure there weren't actually real coffee grounds mixed in with the chocolate.  Apparently there aren't, only "natural coffee flavor," but you may find yourself doing a double take too.  Nominally, the chocolate may be milk chocolate (there is some cocoa butter listed) but the taste impression is of dark chocolate, probably because the dark roast bean flavor is itself so similar to that of bittersweet chocolate.  But we aren't done with the "dark" flavors yet.

It's easy to forget how literally big the peanut taste is in these M&Ms.  Seemingly taking up just as much space as the chocolate itself, it's amazing the chocolate-coffee flavor has the impact it does.

The taste of these mocha-spiked chocolates is so intense because they combine three roasted flavors: roasted coffee beans, fermented and roasted cocoa beans, and roasted peanuts, all of which reinforce one another.  Coffee purists might argue that hazelnuts would have been the better choice, paired as they often are with coffee, but peanuts are cheaper and, in the company of all these other dominating tastes, quite sufficient in their nuttiness to complete the flavor impression that Mars was trying for here.  All of those volatile oils and rare essences deep within the two beans and one nutty legume twirl around together, lingering on the tongue and in the nostrils long after the contents have been devoured.

Conclusions
A skeptical customer viewing these on the shelf might have expected this to be a compromise project, along the lines of General Foods International Coffees.  Meek chocolate mixed with a whimper of coffee and a weak tribute to nuttiness from a puny peanut.  One sample will prove such a doubter, even one with dulled tastebuds, wrong.  Highly recommended.

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Major Brownie Points: Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-Filled Cookies

Food Science and Gonzo Baking
To the untrained eye, the Chips Ahoy® brand represents an authentic product line, a variety of chocolate chip cookies incorporating assorted flavor variations but essentially hewing close to a central identity of chocolate chip cookiedom.  But closer inspection reveals the truth: Chips Ahoy® is an experimental product development platform, a bakery skunkworks devoted to testing ideas from the conventional to the bizarre, often masking the radical nature of the experiment by hiding behind the familiar safety of the Chips Ahoy name.  If Nabisco were to release a soft citrus cookie with lemon-lime chips and a gelatinous lime-meringueish filling all on its own, a revolted public would flee the store in disgust.  But if you were to call them Chips Ahoy's Ghostbusters Key-Lime Ectoblasts, the same consumers would probably shrug and throw them in the cart just to try them out.

Limited edition flavors like these come along all the time and are usually here today and gone tomorrow.  Nabisco is promising the technological marvel of a brownie inside a cookie. But is this just another lame gimmick?  

The Turducken of Cookies?
This can-do try anything spirit yields a mixed cookie bag and in a future review we'll examine the mealy, grainy, perplexing fiasco that is the Chips Ahoy S'mores cookie.  But today we'll talk about one of the unqualified successes, the Chewy Chips Ahoy Brownie-filled cookies.  To start with, the mere appearance of the cookie is downright magical, for its completely convincing facade of a normal chocolate chip cookie turns out to be merely a micro-thin mirage of a wrapper, inside which is a super-intense double-chocolatey brownie filling.  In this era of 3-D printing, it's not hard to imagine how this might be done.  On the assembly line, an extruder would squeeze out a thin bottom layer of conventional chocolate chip cookie dough, a second extruder would squirt a dollop of brownie batter on top of that, and a final third extruder then ejects a layer of cookie batter camouflage to enrobe the rest.  But even after understanding the technology behind the feat, the sight of a credible brownie tucked behind a film-thin layer of cookie is kind of amazing.

Nothing about their outward appearance would suggest anything unusual.  Going in, I was convinced that the supposed brownie interior would be a thin, unobtrusive and flavorless brown strip, the very same cookie dough stained a different color.

The Brownie Is Real
It wasn't that long ago that the Food Kingdom had a post on the extreme difficulty of mass-manufacturing a high-quality prepackaged brownie.  How ironic that such a brownie should finally arrive encased inside a cookie.  Is the secret to be found in the protective cookie shell?  Whatever the reason, the brownie within the cookie coating is everything most mass market brownies are not: dark, deep, fudgy, almost European in its commitment to a high-cacao-content true chocolate taste.  If you recall craving double-chocolate cookies as a kid, this is that next-level triple-chocolate taste you've been waiting for.

Proving the doubters wrong, this fascinating experiment actually delivers what it promises.  You can see that the brownie filling really is of a different texture and consistency from the crumbly, buttery-tasting cookie on the outside. And although the brownie dominates the overall flavor of this hybrid cookie, the golden exterior is a true cookie, not a flavorless casing.

And Yet So Is the Cookie
The only drawback to the assertiveness of the brownie's chocolatey flavor is the way it dominates and overshadows the flavor of the cookie that's wrapped around it.  I had just assumed that Nabisco put very little effort into that part of the cookie since it's only there to set up the power-packed surprise that's inside it.  In the interest of due diligence, I did finally start nibbling around the perimeter of these cookies, just to see what the golden bits on the edges tasted like.   Surprisingly, it's truly a well-crafted chocolate chip cookie with a blonde buttery flavor, a semi-crisp/semi-chewy texture, and the best overall taste profile of any chocolate chip cookie in the Chips Ahoy® line.   Although the subtle golden brown-sugar notes of this outer cookie are completely overwhelmed in terms of what one consciously tastes when biting into these cookies, I can only assume that in some way they provide balance and complexity to the overall composite flavor profile.  They should make a cookie that uses only this batter, but of course they almost certainly won't.

Conclusions
Bold, persistent experimentation does not always yield perfect results, but expect Chips Ahoy to keep unveiling new and interesting novelty flavors.  And hope that this one stays on the shelf for a good long while.

Chick fil-A's Egg White Grill - But for Want of a Muffin...

Tyranny of the Weakest Link
"What I could really go for now is a whole-wheat English Muffin, with no butter" said noone...ever.  And yet Chic fil-A has jumped into the healthy breakfast arena with a product predicated on just such a fantasy: the new Egg White Grill, a sandwich so blandly named (as has always been Chic Fil-A's wont) that it shall henceforth be known to most customers, for as long as it stays on offer, as "#3 with small coffee."  And it is this whole wheat English muffin that stifles an otherwise promising dish in its cradle.

This is a shame because every other part of the sandwich is expertly executed.  If one were to judge the sandwich by its components like the blind men groping the proverbial elephant, one would be prepared to describe it differently.  Tasting the warm, smoky, generously portioned, and attractively seasoned chicken breast section, you'd proclaim "this is a juicy, satisfying, and exciting new way to enjoy chicken for breakfast."  If you sampled the slick folds of fried egg white, you'd say "nobody will ever miss the yolk!"  If you ran your pinky through the semi-liquified cheese slice that, upon melting, coats the muffin and the egg white slab like unctuous finger-paint, and took a lick, you might say "who needs butter when this thing is slathered with queso dip?"

And you would be right.  But all that effort is undone by the aggressively unpleasant whole wheat English muffin that sucks up moisture and snuffs out flavor like a pile of sand.

The early autumn sun rises on the first of three tastings of the Egg White Grill.  It looks like a reasonably proportioned sandwich, the top bun raised aloft on grilled chicken and egg whites draped with downfolded wings of American cheese.  But the high rounded dome of whole wheat dryness is an ominous sign.

What's Wrong with Whole Wheat English Muffins?
Trusting your sandwich to a whole wheat breadstuff isn't so unreasonable in principle; it's not like dark breads are inherently unpalatable.  I can genuinely enjoy nicely buttered wheat berry toast with black coffee.  Ham on pumpernickel is delightful.  And the most elemental whole wheat products, breakfast shredded wheat and Triscuits, are American classics.  So whole wheat per se is not the problem.  But there are nonetheless certain products where whole wheat's presence is disastrous.  Think whole wheat pasta and you start to get the idea.  And whole wheat's influence on English Muffins is similarly insidious.

One primary reason is that a glutenous stretchiness is part of an English Muffin's appeal, and whole wheat flour contains much less gluten, so this bread doesn't have the same stretch and chew.  It's more like the limp foam stuffing inside a cheap couch, spongy and moisture-neutralizing.  And whereas the glutenous dough of a white muffin will trap steam within its microscopic bubbles, creating a crisp moistness when toasted, the whole wheat muffin seems to contain deserts within deserts.  Then there's the flavor, some strange combination of sawdust and old bookbindings, mildewy, dark and stale, the antithesis of a morning brightener.  It tastes like rotted attic planks smell.

The second tasting within the Food Kingdom studios, made the dry, bland taste even harder to understand.  Look at that cheesy ooze!  But we're staring straight at this sandwich's assets.  The liabilities that undermine this sandwich are hidden from view.

Quantities and Ratios
The taste-nullifying properties of the whole wheat muffin might not figure so large if there weren't so much of it.  Fast-food leaders like Wendy's have long known that the bread in a sandwich is meant to be unobtrusive and should serve mainly as a vehicle for allowing the hands to convey the sandwich fillings into the eater's mouth without cancelling out the featured flavors.  If the wheat muffin could have been made, say 30% thinner, this would probably be a different review.  But an examination of the Egg White Grill's cross section reveals the fundamental flaw, that the muffin itself is almost twice the thickness of the chicken, egg, and cheese put together.  The photo below tells the sad tale.

This view from the third tasting (I really wanted to like this and give it every chance!) really clarifies the issue.  The cheesy egg and the chicken with genuine grilled taste are delicious and they are provided in reasonable quantities, but not relative to the over-apportionment of whole wheat bread. Dusted with powdery residue, and seemingly growing like a fungus, this nasty muffin is choking the life out of its fillings.

All in the Name of Nutrition
Using an abominable whole wheat English Muffin in place of a tasty traditional one is all the more pointless when you consider the nutrition facts, easily obtainable through a web search.  Despite its whole wheat pedigree, the Chick Fil-A muffin actually contains zero grams of dietary fiber.  As for carbs, it supplies 16 grams as opposed to the 26 grams contained in a standard Thomas's English Muffin.  But put that in the context of the standard recommendations of daily carbohydrate intake.  For a person on a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet, the USDA recommends between 225 to 326 grams of carbs per day.  Even for a restricted diet of 1,500 calories, the recommendation is for between 170 to 245 grams per day.  So the additional 10 carbs supplied by a white English muffin would only represent 1/17th of a person's carbohydrate allowance for the day under the most restrictive conditions.  The Food Kingdom recommends getting a breakfast sandwich you really enjoy.  The piece of your soul that yearns for a good breakfast will thank you.

Swedish Fish Oreos - "Raspberries" Roaring Out of the Gate

Be Not Afeared
Oreo has released yet another custom special-edition flavor: Swedish Fish, popularly known as "Swedish Red Fish", and it would be reasonable to assume that they represent just another gimmick, and a frighteningly perverse one at that.  Really, an Oreo based on a gummy snack?  That just feels weird.  What is "Swedish Fish" flavor anyway?  But in reality, these cookies seize the mild berry flavor present in the candy and supercharge it, delivering an intoxicating flavor punch of fruit and chocolate that could very well make this a permanent staple in the ever-growing roster of Oreo varieties.

A Kroger/Harris Teeter Exclusive
Although these cookies have been on the market for about a month, it took nearly three weeks for The Food Kingdom to acquire them because of an artificially restricted supply.  They're only available at Kroger or Harris Teeter, whom Kroger acquired for $2.4 billion in a 2013 merger.  Five trips to four different locations yielded only empty shelf space where these red and brown cookies had once been before a seemingly eager public snatched them up.  With the initial wave of interest subsiding, you should now be able to find them, assuming you have one of these chains near you.

If you're thinking "I don't want to taste a gummi mushed inside a pair of chocolate wafers" I can hardly blame you.  But that's the wrong way to think about them.  Instead, think fruit and chocolate, and start salivating.

Unlocking the Mystery of the Swedish Fish Flavor
If you're like me, you may have eaten the red variety (they come in red, yellow, green and "black licorice" in their native Sweden) of this "wine gum" candy for years without ever seriously considering what the flavor actually was, and I think there are several interesting reasons for that: first, the flavor isn't officially stated anywhere on the package, secondly their reputed flavor of "lingonberry" is unfamiliar to the American palate and thirdly, well...the third reason is the most interesting of all and fundamental to the success of the flavor's translation to sandwich cookie form.  Essentially, the flavor of any gummy candy will always be muted relative to that same flavor in other mediums, because gummy candies don't release their flavors easily.  Gummy isn't porous and doesn't dissolve readily, unlike hard candy which melts away as you suck on it, imparting flavor as your mouth surrounds it with saliva.  If you just suck on a piece of gummy, by contrast, nothing will happen.  You have to chew and grind your way through the rubbery substance, reducing it almost to a mash before enough denatured surface area is exposed to finally allow the flavoring to dissolve on the tongue.  And so the "lingonberry" flavor of Swedish Fish flavor is mild and vague.

Swedish Fish Oreos, on the other hand, take the same artificial berry flavor (sorry Lingonberry purists) and inject it into their smooth, fatty creme filling.   This creme filling is everything that gummy is not.  It spreads readily throughout the mouth, melting on contact and coating every crevice of the mouth with intense fruit taste.

These sinister-looking chocolate devils could be great fun at Halloween.  Tell trick or treaters they're filled with the blood of naughty children.

How Do You Feel About Fruit and Chocolate?
As mentioned above, the fruit flavor in question here probably is indeed lingonberry, a favorite fruit in Sweden for there are subtle "winy", dark, and almost distilled brandy notes that distinguish the flavor from anything else.  But if you didn't know any better you would probably have guessed the flavor to be raspberry, or more specifically "framboise" the French alcoholic cordial fermented with raspberries, the most popular brand of which is Chambord.  In fact, children of the 80's like me will probably have their nostalgia cells activated by the Chocolate-Chambord flavor combination, which calls to mind all sorts of mixed drinks from the 80s: hot chocolate and Chambord, Chambord, cream, Creme de Cacao and crushed ice, White Russians with Chambord and such.

Ultimately, how you feel about these cookies will depend on whether you like fruit combined with chocolate.  Some people think that's an icky combination, but if you like chocolate-colored cherries, chocolate oranges, or chocolate-raspberry tortes, then the way Swedish Fish Oreos capture that dark, mysterious combination of tastes will be in heaven.

The filling tastes as red as it looks: intense, mysterious, descending into layered depths.

Conclusions
As with all specialty Oreos, the exotic flavor comes at an inflated price.  You get a much smaller box for the same money than you would with your basic white-creme Oreos.  But this adult dalliance with sinfulness is worth the steeper amount.

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Summit Storm and the Return of Real Gatorade Taste

The Missing Ingredient
Let's begin this review with a question: have you tasted Gatorade lately?  And if not, have you ever wondered why that might be?  If you're anything like me it's because, for a while now, Gatorade hasn't tasted like the sports drink that I grew up with in the 70s through the aughts; the thirst quencher with the magically slippery texture.  This magic sensation that came from quaffing Gatorade, this sense that you were drinking something wetter than wet, more penetrating than mere water, was a key selling point for most of its history.  Those ridiculously hokey computer simulations in their advertisements where the parched and pixelated thermal image of an athlete, an overheated orange and red through and through, held a Gatorade to his lips and transformed to a healthy hydrated green, were absurd on a rational level.  Yet they seemed entirely plausible based on how the drink made you feel.  Back then, Gatorade seemed to sprint down the gullet, barreling down like quicksilver into the gut, distributing throughout the body, replenishing energy and lost liquids.

Magic and Chemicals
That greased-lightning, super-wet sensation was, of course no accident, but the result of chemical engineering, specifically the inclusion of two emulsifiers: ester of wood rosin and brominated vegetable oil.  I don't honestly know if they were even intended to create the distinctive Gatorade texture and mouthfeel (throatfeel?) because their ultimate purpose is more practical than that.  The citrus oils that were used in the original lemon-lime flavor, crafted in 1965 by University of Florida researchers for the use of Florida Gator athletes, hence the name, didn't properly mix unaided.  As with any combination of oil and water, the natural inclination of citrus oils held in suspension with water was to separate, resulting in the citrus oils forming a slick top layer floating above the water layer.  But if you blend the citrus oil with brominated vegetable oil and aid the emulsifying process with a wood-rosin derivative, the flavoring oils will mix seamlessly with water in an emulsion.  And a water-oil emulsion, to the delight and gratitude of generations of athletes and other thirsty people everywhere, tastes just like one might imagine -- as wet as water but as slick as oil.

Stripped of their magic formula, the people at Gatorade have had to resort to other means to keep the product interesting, like designing flavors based on weather patterns.  Their newest creation, Summit Storm, available exclusively at 7-11, tastes like a combination of grape and melon.

Paradise Lost

It was in 2014 that Gatorade stopped being the product we all knew and loved.  A Mississippi teenager started a petition campaign through Change.org to remove the brominated vegetable oil (BVO) from the formula.  One objection was that BVO was a flame retardant, which seems a non sequitur to me, and also that Japan and the European Union had not approved its use, although the FDA did and still does consider it safe for human consumption.  There is evidence that BVO is harmful if taken in excess, as one man who consumed a vast quantity of a BVO-containing beverage found out.  To quote the Wikipedia article on the subject "[o]ne case reported that a man who consumed two-to-four liters of a soda containing BVO on a daily basis (emphasis mine) experienced memory loss, tremors, fatigue, loss of muscle coordination, headache, and ptosis of the right eyelid, as well as elevated serum chloride and...also lost the ability to walk."

Such a horrific episode is not to be minimized, but it seems to me the rarity of this result, one unheard of among the millions who have enjoyed Gatorade over the years, should be instructive.  Be that as it may, BVO was removed.  Ester of wood rosin was retained, but given the more euphemistic name "glycerol ester of rosin".  It seems to get the job of emulsification done on its own, but the slippery feel of the original is much diminished.  An echo of it remains but Gatorade is now much more of a mere flavored sugar water, with none of the mystique that has sustained it as a market leader for decades.

Enter the Summit Storm

Somewhat hamstrung, the Gatorade brand has nonetheless limped along, trying to gin up excitement with new and novel flavors and flavor lines like their "Gatorade Frost" line, whose flavors are not named after fruits but rather forces of nature like "Arctic Blitz", "Icy Charge", "Glacier Freeze" and now "Summit Storm".  "Summit Storm" was recently on offer, exclusively at 7-11 for the bargain price of two 28 oz bottles for $3 and I was thereby induced to pay my old friend Gatorade a visit.

Fortunately for our taste buds, these winter-hardship based flavors aren't actually intended to simulate the taste of weather events.  If they were, Summit Storm would taste like a murky blend of mineral-rich ice crystals and airborne particulate sediment.  Instead, these flavors are a blend of anonymous fruits with austere, spartan flavor profiles.  Summit Storm seems to be some combination of grape and melon, pleasingly semi-sweet with a semi-medicinal or vegetal kelpish note.

A view into the cloudy, purple, eye of the summit storm.  Another side effect of the chemical emulsifier glycerol ester of rosin is a bit of cloudiness, which Gatorade has decided to leverage by attaching cloud-based imagery to it.

A Ray of Light Through the Clouds

Apart from the novel grape-melon-vegetable flavor,  I did notice something else while drinking my two tall bottles of Summit Storm: some of the slipperiness seems to have found its way back into the mix.  I'm not sure of the cause - perhaps they've added more citrus  or other oils, albeit not brominated, and added more ester of rosin to increase the oil content without the aid of bromination.  Whatever they've done, it hasn't quite brought back the original slick sensation, but Gatorade is once more something greater than a mere flavored fruit drink.  We can still mourn for what has been lost; we can still resent the transient fireball of activism that killed a great product for the silent majority of innocent bystanders.  But food chemistry and the competitive marketplace continue on apace and the creativity with which industry meets the desires of the public continues to impress and amaze.

If you had examined this ingredient list prior to 2014, brominated vegetable oil would have been included.  Now there are fewer ingredients not normally seen in nature, though glycerol ester of rosin should still pull some readers up short.  Also of note is the natural coloring "purple sweet potato juice."  I suppose it must be an Andean summit storm at that.