When it comes to fruit, I’ve a weakness for tropical and ‘exotic’ fruits. Sure, their limited availability makes them enticing, but many taste far and away more delicious than ‘regular’ fruits. Lychees are my favourite. Here, we have Wrigley’s Life Savers Gummies Exotics, a bag full of gummies flavoured with exotic fruits.

Each gummy is the ring shape of the regular hard candy, embossed with ‘Life Savers’. The gummy is soft yet firm with a little resistance giving a good bounce on the teeth. In terms of texture, they sit somewhere between gummy by Kasugai (soft) and Haribo (firm). There are five flavours: lemon star fruit, mandarin orange, Asian pear, fuji apple and raspberry dragonfruit.

Green is Asian pear. Asian pears are usually nashi pears and we arrived at the conclusion that green is Asian pear by elimination, after assigning flavours to the other colours. These have a generic sweet fruity flavour that borders on Berry Blue Aeroplane jelly (which don’t taste like blueberries).

Purple is raspberry dragonfruit. The raspberry is the dominant flavour here, although it does taste watered down compared to the intensity of usual raspberry flavours, suggesting it’s taken on the subtle watery nutty flavour of dragonfruit, which has little flavour of its own otherwise.

Yellow is star fruit. The lemon is prominent with a slight hint of apple that reminds of a star fruit. Unripe star fruit is sour, though so these fare better than the Asian pear.

Orange is mandarin orange. Mandarins have a sweeter and more aromatic flavour than oranges, but here the flavour was much like the more sour flavours of an orange.

Red is fuji apple. These have a pleasant sweet apple flavour but lacked the crispness of fuji apple.

With very few of the flavours being on point for the exotic fruit they took after, identifying the colour for each flavour involves picking up on the dominant non-exotic flavour. Or in the case of the nashi pear, solving by elimination, which reduces the enjoyment of these gummies immensely. Wrigley’s should stick to more mainstream flavours and let the Japanese translate exotic flavours into candy.

ThisWrigley’s Life Savers Gummies Exotics contained 198 g. It was produced in the United States and purchased in New York, United States in 2016.