This is the Welch’s Fruit Snacks Mixed Fruit. I’d been impressed by their collaboration with Asahi in the Rose Sparkling so was curious as to whether they had the same punchy, bright natural fruity flavour as the drink. They call themselves ‘fruit snacks’ that are ‘made with real fruit’ but there’s enough corn syrup and sugar (47%) in them to properly classify them as candies if we’re honest.
Each bag featured five flavours:
- grape (dark purple, grape-shaped): this was the flavour for which I had the highest hopes since Welch’s is famous for making grape juice from dark Concord grapes. Alas, I was disappointed as they tasted like grape-flavoured cough syrup from childhood. It had the same intense sweetness but none of the balancing acidity of Kyohō grapes from Japan.
- peach (yellow, peach-shaped): this one also tasted like peach vanilla-flavoured cough syrup. While that was not the main medicine from my childhood so I have less of a general aversion to yellow-peach flavoured foods, this intense sweetness of this ‘fruit snack’ veered away from any fresh fruit flavour and into the medicinal territory.
- orange (orange, hemispherical slice): this was a difficult flavour to get wrong with the most usual downside being that numbness of the mouth after eating due to the amount of orange oil used. However, Welch’s managed to even do this flavour poorly — it lacked any acidity or zestiness, leaving a generic fruitiness.
- strawberry (orange-red, strawberry-shaped): this was the best flavour of the five, although that’s not saying much. The flavour of strawberry — much like a jam — came through very briefly a few seconds into the bite before that too dissipated into a generic fruity sweetness.
- raspberry (pale pink, berry shaped): this one had a very gentle fruity berry flavour, but lacked the punchiness of the fresh fruit itself to make an impression.
Now, if the flavours weren’t enough to leave me running back to my faultless Haribo Gold Bears, the texture made sure of it. The texture was soft and gummy (in a bad ‘sticks to your teeth/gums’ way) and lacked any of the moreish bounce that made eating Haribo Gold Bears worth the sugar intake.
This Welch’s Fruit Snacks Mixed Fruit contained 25 g. It was produced in the United States and received as a gift from acquaintances in Sydney, Australia in 2021.