Haribo – Fruit Salad
When I hear the combination of words “fruit salad” in that order, I tend to think of the ever so common style of mayo based salads where fruits are diced and thrown into a bowl and tossed with mayo. So much mayo. Truthfully I dislike mayo based salads with a fiery passion, and the mere thought of fruit salad sends me into a visceral disgust. Now that being said, I trust Haribo, for better or worse, so I gave this product a more thorough inspection beyond that initial gut wrench.
I don’t know if fruit salad has a different meaning in Germany or Europe, but I am definitely glad it isn’t the same as what we have in North America. I see a lot of different fruits here, some of which I wouldn’t have envisioned in a bowl of fruit that is supposed to be cohesive and not clash too much. Lemon for example, is a weird fruit to include in an actual fruit bowl, if you already have orange and grapefruit. It’s just too much citrus!
We’ve got six flavours here – cherry, orange, peach, grapefruit, lemon and passion fruit. Some of these are very similar to each other in colour, so it’s a good thing they have different shapes to help distinguish between them. Cherry reminds me a lot of cherry blasters, but with more of a floral flavour then just straight up sugar. Lemon is a very strong lemon peel flavour that Haribo uses in their gummies as well. It’s sweet, but has the distinct lemon flavour to it. Orange is a fairly standard orange peel flavour that is slightly less tart and doesn’t leave much of a burning sensation from the citric acid. Grapefruit is noticeably distinct in that it has the same qualities of a grapefruit – tart, ever so slightly bitter but also with lots of sugar so it doesn’t make my mouth pucker. Peach is very reminiscent of a fuzzy peach, but with more of that stone fruit earthy quality to it and makes me crave a real peach. Passion fruit, which I only had one piece in the entire bag, was very floral, and sort of reminded me of scented shampoo or body wash.
Texture is a very straight forward fruit jelly – the outer coating of sugar is a little firm and crunchy, and the center is quite soft and somewhat sticky. These don’t have much gumminess to them, so there’s not too much bounce or chewiness to them, but enough to keep them interesting.
Final verdict? If you like fruit jellies these are great. Truthfully I’m not a huge fan of that style of candy, but I do appreciate the flavour and variety here, and it’s a relatively low cost way to get your fruit jelly fix. All in all I would get this again if the mood strikes.
