Well, now that we’re in September most of the stores have started rolling out their seasonal swag. I haven’t fully dived into the merchandise yet, but I have been picking up a lot of sugary items. I thought I’d share some of the stuff that’s stuck out so far, in particular some of the gummy candies that I thought were interesting.
First up we have a package of Target branded Berry Oozing Gummy Candy Skulls…
Every year there are a lot of “generic” Halloween gummy candies that are packaged and re-packaged under different brands. So no matter where you go, you tend to find the same little red, white, and blue gummy brains and multi-colored gummy candy corn under a multitude of different store packaging. The same is true this year, though amidst the pile at Target were these seriously creepy gummy skulls that were sort of a breath of fresh air since the mold is completely unfamiliar to me. I was really impressed with the eerie vein-y-ness and clenched teeth on these skulls, and was intrigued by their berry-flavored ozzing blood…
Flavor-wise, these guys aren’t bad, though I’m not usually a fan of the opaque, marshmallow gummy candies. The oozing factor was cool and was surprisingly abundant in most of the heads (which is rare with this sort of gimmick.) As far as the packaging goes, it’s pretty sparse as most of the Target branded candy packaging is and features only one of their 2011 kid-centric Halloween characters. It’s looking pretty clear that the characters they’ve designed are going in the Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends direction, which seems to be the theme in a lot of the stores this year.
The next gummy selection is the one big name brand entry today, a box of Lifesavers Spooky Shapes Gummies. I remember these from last year with these same “Universal” monster mascots (which also appear on packages of Bubble Tape), though they were only available in a big bag of individual packets. I like that they offered a small box so that I could more affordably try them…
I’m also glad because these were the only gummy candies that I absolutely couldn’t stand the flavor of, so I won’t have any extra packets that I’ll have to pawn off on unsuspecting Trick-or-Treaters later. There are a lot of gummy products on on the market that get Halloween-y branded packaging this time of year, but not all that many that actually use seasonal molds, so I do have to give these credit for at least having spooky shapes. I was surprised that there were so few though, as the larger bag has a whole bunch more…
Finally we have a couple different offerings from the Black Forest brand under the Ferrara Pan Candy Company…
There was a pretty neat display of these at my local Kroger which featured individual bags of both Gummy Vampires and Werewolves. As an added attraction, the Vampire gummys were also “Juicy Oozers”. Both sets had fun themed shapes (the werewolf pack featured wolf paw prints as well werewolf bodies and heads, while the vampire pack had bats, coffins, vampire mouths and heads.) Though the oozing wasn’t as prevalent in these gummys as the Target skulls, these both featured some of the best tasting gummies so far. I also really love the packaging design. You don’t see very many werewolf themed food products, at least not nearly as many as I’d like.
There are some more Halloween gummy products that I want to talk about, but they’re a little different than these, so I think I’ll save those for later in the month…