Sugar, artificial flavourings and gelatine-rush sweets (Haribo Kiddies Super Mix)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Haribo Kiddies Super Mix
Date:	04/11/09 (35 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap and tasty 'gummy'-style sweets

Disadvantages: Packed with sugar and lord alone knows what other artificial products

We call these 'the sweets that make you angry' in our house.

This is because if we buy a bag of them, the sprog won't rest until the whole lot are consumed, and as a 300g bag of fruit-flavoured jelly sweets is far too much for a four year old to eat at one sitting I usually end up throwing most of the packet into the bin - just for a quiet life.

Still, we got some of these to have on hand in case any guisers / trick-or-treat-ers came round to the house at Halloween (they cost just over a quid for a bag at Tesco). In the event, everyone it seems, stayed home, presumably to watch 'The X Factor' instead - so we were left with a load of these dodgy sweets on our hands.

I ate some and found them....fantastically more-ish. There are ones like little minature jelly babies that come in a variety of mostly idistinguishable fruit flavours (mostly orange ones in the bags we got, for some reason) which are tangy and succulent and wonderful to eat. Then there are weird translucent jelly shapes like loops - which are all right, and least favoured of all these sort of....white foam / jelly hybrid animal-shaped ones that have a most unfortunate rubbery texture and are very difficult to eat.

For the health-conscious - as if anyone buys or eats Haribo sweets fo the good of their health - despite all of the sweets in this particular 'mix' being very luridly coloured indeed, apparently the Haribo Kiddie Super Mix product doesn't contain any artificial colourings - which came as a real surprise to me. They do have artificial flavourings however but at least no artificial sweeteners; clearly they're sugar-packed enough already. I don't know whether they contain preservatives. What I do worry about when eating sweets of this type is the gelatine content - gelatine being an animal hoof and bone-derived product which is integral to the manufacture of these 'gummy'-type sweets. It's not a million years since the BSE / infected bovine spinal cord scares of the 1990s, and frankly I'm still not confident about the safety of eating products which contain a proportion of bone-derived material which may have come from ruminant carcasses.

The bottom line, I feel, is that there's no good reason for eating a product such as 'Haribo Kiddies Super Mix.' It's a shame because the sprog likes them but I don't want to buy them regularly, and the alternative of only buying them only sometimes would make them seem like a treat, which I don't think is a good idea for a completely nutrition-free product like this at all. Though I did enjoy some of the sweets I ate myself, as usual I will be putting the rest of them in the bin.

Summary: Dodgy-looking sweets that nobody, really, should be encouraged to eat