Give it some jelly (Jelly Belly Beans)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Jelly Belly Beans
Date:	09/11/09 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice and juicy, vegetarian, some flavours are very nice...

Disadvantages: ...but some are less so! No nutrition info on box

Jelly Belly is probably the best known jelly bean brand in the UK. Admittedly that's not saying a great deal - go on, I challenge you: write down ten jelly bean brands that come into your head. Okay, I'll stop there before this review starts looking like a particularly dull (and unfortunately very common) market research survey question, but you get the point. Jelly Belly don't really have a lot of competition in the name recognition stakes.

Jelly Belly is, as you might expect, a US company, producing no less than 15,000 tonnes of "candy" (well, these people are American) every year. They're tremendously popular on the western side of the Atlantic, having even been sent up to Space Shuttle astronauts in the 1980s on behalf of Preisdent Reagan, a noted fan of the sweets. However, they're now fairly common in the UK as well, and British-spec boxes are available in many shops - though even large supermarkets don't always have them, so you do need to search around a bit.

My pack was a small 30-gram cardboard box, which came from a garden centre gift shop and cost around 70p: I think that's a little bit expensive considering how small the box is: I got just 27 beans in mine. You can buy larger packs, though: there's even a huge 1.5-kilogram bag, which is most easily bought via mail order or very large department stores (Selfridges in Birmingham stocked it last time I looked) and costs around £25. You do need to be awfully sure that you like these jelly beans to buy one of those, though!

The box design is fairly simple: the front shows a collection of multi-coloured jelly beans on a white background, plus the Jelly Belly logo and a small plastic window (such as crisp packets used to have) through which you can see the box's contents. Around the back is a graphic representation of the included flavours. There are 50 flavours in the Jelly Belly range, though for some reason assortments often include just 49, leaving out jalapeño. However, the small boxes have only ten, and they are: Top Banana, Blueberry, Tutti-Frutti, Lemon, Juicy Pear, Very Cherry, Green Apple, Coconut, Watermelon and Tangerine.

Apart from the label mentioning "assorted flavours" (yes, with a U - told you this was British-spec!) the only other thing of interest on the box is the ingredients list: note that there is *no nutrition information* provided anywhere, which I think is a bit off even for a tiny box like this. As for those ingredients, well... the good news is that there's no gelatine, so vegetarians can indulge. There's also some real fruit juice, though it doesn't look like much. There are *eight* E-numbered colourings, however, including the dreaded tartrazine. Jelly Belly beans are made in a plant that processes peanuts; no other allergy information is given.

Opening the box doesn't really reveal a smell of anything except cardboard, but that's okay; the eating is what matters! And here, I have to report that the results are mixed. The beans are quite soft and chewy; you won't lose your fillings eating them! Usually with sweets such as these, the most reliable flavours are the citrus fruits, and Jelly Belly follows form: the lemon bean is zingy and refreshing, while the tangerine isn't bad at all either. I was also impressed by the Tutti-Frutti bean, though perhaps because I miss tutti-frutti ice cream (where *has* that stuff disappeared to?), and the watermelon, though a bit thinly flavoured, did at least taste like watermelon.

The main disappointment was the so-called Juicy Pear bean. I don't know what American pears tend to taste like, but if this is remotely close then I'm not surprised we don't import them. It had a frankly rather nasty, metallic edge to it, and I was quite relieved that the box contained only one. The Top Banana flavour is a brave effort, but not a successful one: it tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike banana. And despite the apparent cult status of the Very Cherry bean in the US, I didn't think much of that either: American cherry flavour sweets seem to me to lack the tartness essential to the fruit's appeal. (I found the same with cherry M&Ms.)

Overall, Jelly Belly beans are not at all bad, but they're really not the screamingly wonderful premium product the manufacturers would like us to believe. They're a little bit too sweet on the whole, and the presence of several frankly rather poor flavours, together with the high price, detracts from what is otherwise quite a nice assortment. This would be 3.5 stars, but I'm rounding down for the lack of even basic nutrition information on the box.

Summary: Quite nice sweets, but not as special as the ads suggest