Basically Bad (Sainsbury's Basics Foam Fruits)

Member Name: skittle

Product:	Sainsbury's Basics Foam Fruits
Date:	06/11/07 (123 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap

Disadvantages: Nasty

Recently I’ve been on a bit of an economy drive, what with Christmas coming up, and we all know what an expensive time of year it is. So checking out the cheaper alternatives when shopping at Sainsbury’s last week, I came across this bag of fruit flavour foam candy at only 35p for 200g. Bargain, I thought, and popped them on my order.

Ok, admittedly the packaging is pretty uninspiring, the usual basics packaging, mostly white with an orange strip across the top, but to be honest as economy was the name of the game this didn’t bother me at all. As these foam fruits are quite light, you do get a lot of sweets for your 35p, which suited me fine.

Unfortunately, as you can’t see into the bag itself to check out the foam fruits, you can’t get any idea of what they actually look like. Personally I had a picture in my head of those luscious foamy strawberries you can get from the newsagents…

I was disappointed. When I first opened the bag there was no noticeable fruity smell, in fact, no smell I recognised at all, apart from the faintly plasticy one from the packet. The sweets themselves were pretty flat, very pale, shiny in places and coated in a very thin white powder in others, not at all tempting. I’d expected ‘foam fruits’ to be floaty-light, but these are actually surprising dense. They come in three colours and shapes; banana, strawberry and orange. I’d like to say they come in three flavours too, but unfortunately that would be stretching the truth.

I was all ready to tuck into these foam fruits, despite their unappealing looks, until I had a closer look at the ingredients. Unsurprisingly, the main ingredient is sugar. After that there’s glucose syrup (although surely that’s just more sugar), water, dextrose, beef gelatine, maize starch, flavourings, natural colours: Betanin, Curcumin.

Beef gelatine, in sweets? Hm, well I’m a vegetarian, so these were now out of the question for me, but that’s ok as I had three other family members around that day that I could experiment on. So I handed the foam fruits around. My father in law refused point blank. Mother in law tried a banana sweet then refused any more, as they’re too sweet for her. Hubby was a bit of a triumph for Sainsbury’s Basics Foam Fruits to begin with. He proclaimed his first foamy banana ‘nice’ saying that it reminded him of the banana milkshakes he used to eat when he was a kid, he also found the sweets surprisingly chewy. He then ate another banana sweet, still nice, but by the third one he’d had enough, complaining that they were just too sickly to eat anymore – this from the man who can eat half a six portion Black Forest Gateaux in one go. Being the evil person I am, I insisted that he tried an orange and a strawberry one too – purely for scientific purposes, of course – he proclaimed them both awful, tasting of sugar and not at all of fruit.

So, the family were not impressed with these foam fruits, I wondered what the dogs would make of them. Skittle’s usually pretty picky, but she does have a very sweet tooth – after a suspicious sniff she ate hers without chewing. Asha is a canine dustbin to be honest; her sweet was gone in seconds. Mokee, however, took her sweet to begin with, then spat it out and wouldn’t touch it again. I tried her with all three colours (just can’t bring myself to call them flavours) and she had no interest, surprisingly as she normally eats unusual foods like grapes and lettuce, but not these. However, I wasn’t left with sweets all over the carpet, as Asha followed Mo around stealing all her leftovers.

Taking one last, final look at the packet before consigning what was left of the sweets to the rubbish bin, I noticed that these sweets contain 188 calories per 50g, pretty high, but only 0.1g fat and a trace of saturated fat. I was quite impressed by this, until I noticed that 50g of sweets also contains a whopping 44.6g sugar! No wonder sugar was the over-riding flavour. I felt a bit dim, in all honesty, for not realising that these ‘sweets’ were basically coloured, solidified sugar with a bit of cow thrown in for good measure.

The allergy advice, if you’re still considering trying these, warns that these sweets contain wheat gluton. In my opinion they would have been better off warning people about the sugar content.

So, am I happy with my 35p bargain purchase? Not at all. I realise that this is a no-frills product, but at the end of the day all you’re getting with Sainsbury’s Basics Foam Fruits is a large bag of blandly, sugary sweets that don’t even taste fruity, or have a foamy texture. However, I can now see that the mistake was mine for choosing Basics sweets in the first place. Sweets are supposed to be a luxury item, after all, not a dietary basic. My personal opinion is - save money somewhere else and treat yourself to a smaller packet of sweets that you’ll really enjoy.

Summary: Coloured, solidified sugar with a bit of cow thrown in for good measure