Don't forget the Fruit Gums, mum (Rowntrees Fruit Gums)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Rowntrees Fruit Gums
Date:	05/11/09 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice and juicy, pleasant flavours, not too hich in calories

Disadvantages: Not suitable for those without strong teeth!

Rowntrees is one of the best known and longest standing brands in the confectionery marketplace. After a rather confused few years following the company's takeover by Nestlé a couple of decades ago, it now seems to have settled down to become "the sweet brand", while Nestlé itself is "the chocolate brand". This means that Fruit Gums, themselves an extremely venerable product (launched in 1893!), are back where they belong: under the Rowntrees name.

Fruit Gums are aimed at children, at least as far as modern advertising legislation allows them to be. You can see this from the note on the bright yellow packaging that one standard 48-gram tube contains 170 kcal, or 9% of a *child's* Guideline Daily Amount. There's no indication as to what proportion of an *adult's* GDA it might contain! Oddly, the tube and the Rowntrees website disagree slightly on some of the nutritional values: for example, the wrapper says that Fruit Gums contain 81.1g of carbohydrates per 100g, but the website says 81.3g! Hardly earth-shaking, but odd nevertheless.

The packaging of the tube is a traditional two-layer affair, with the brightly-coloured outer "waxed paper" wrapped around an inner layer of silver foil, just as is seen on a packet of Polos (another Nestlé product). The bigger packs have just the plastic bag, with no inner wrappers at all, but the sweets are actually in fruit shapes, rather than the simple round shapes you find in the tubes. The name "Fruit Gums" is prominent in a (presumably deliberately) slightly childish font, with a smallish splash advertising that the sweets are "Now [made] with 25% fruit juice". This does rather make one wonder what they were made with before: Play-doh? Curtain rings? Salamanders?

Still, a look at the ingredients list does indeed reveal the presence of lemon, lime, orange, strawberry and blackcurrant juice, which is reassuring. Oh, and grape juice. No, me neither. American sweets often have grape flavour where we would have blackcurrant (because growing blackcurrants was federally prohibited for a century as the plants interfered with the logging industry, fact fans!) but I can't think what it's doing in a packet of Fruit Gums. I can only assume that it's a similar deal to those "apple and pear" drinks you can buy that turn out to have mango or something in them because otherwise it doesn't taste right!

The sweets are laid end to end, and the bar I tested had a good mix of flavours. Each sweet is round, with a criss-cross pattern embossed into the top; hazy memories say that this wasn't always so. The smell of fruit is quite strong, if rather too sweet for my taste. The sweets themselves are very sticky and quite tough, almost the consistency of toffee; be careful if you have any remotely loose fillings! Again, though, I seem to remember them being harder still in days of yore, and requiring a great deal of sucking before one could dare start chewing at all.

The taste itself is actually not at all bad: the juiciness comes through at once, and while you wouldn't call it classy you might risk referring to it as mouthwatering, though as with the smell the taste is extremely sweet and sugary - another problem for your teeth to deal with! The sweets do dissolve quite fast, however, which is a bit disappointing. Overall, Fruit Gums seem to me to be just what they appear to be: a pleasant-tasting children's sweet. No more and no less, so a three-star rating seems fair.

Summary: Not the most memorable sweets in existence, but nice once in a while