Life Savers Gummies – 5 Flavours

Life Savers are a classic candy. In my day, they were cheap, available almost everywhere, and came in all sorts of crazy flavours. The candy started life as a hard candy with the distinct lifesaver shape, with the hole in the middle. It was definitely unique shape, and I can’t really remember why they did it, but I imagine it was how they were manufactured, and simply marketed as being different. I remember some of the flavours fondly, most of which are not available anymore as they discontinued them to focus on the core 5. I remember a few flavours very fondly, like butter rum, grape, and a few Sonic cross over flavours. There was this really tasty blue raspberry flavour, and this interesting spicy pineapple flavour. Yes you heard me right, it was a spicy hard candy flavour. Sounds weird, but I loved it for some reason.

Alas, hard candies in general have fallen out of vogue in North America at least, so you’ll likely hear about Life Savers in their gummy form more often these days. I haven’t really given these gummies a chance, so I can’t say whether it’s good or a bad thing, but given that it seems to be more popular than the hard candy, I felt it worth a shot.

While gummies are a completely different medium than hard candy, one thing I can say for sure is these definitely smell very similar to what I remember the hard candies smelling like. Well, at least as far as the original flavours go. I remember the original five being cherry, orange, lemon, lime and pineapple.

There are still five flavours, and they aren’t exactly the standard five I grew up with. For whatever reason, these gummies only keep orange and cherry from the original line up, and introduced watermelon, strawberry and green apple as the new flavours. I’m not a huge fan of these, but I guess people these days prefer these flavours over the others. I am a bit sad that they did away with pineapple though. That one was tied with cherry for being my favourite.

I’d say cherry is probably the most prominent flavour here. Based on smell the strongest, most recognizable flavour is the cherry. This is no surprise, since this is basically the same situation with the original hard candy Life Savers.

The texture of these, while not as firm or hard as Haribo are still somewhere in the medium range, not being too soft and not being too hard. Something something, something something, this is juuuuust right. Is that how the old phrase goes? While I prefer the stiff gummies, I feel like this is just the right amount of chew that appeals to almost everyone.

The watermelon was is a bit on the mild side, and reminds me more of the part of the watermelon that’s close to the rind. It’s ok, but not particularly flavourful or noticeable. Strawberry is also fairly mild, and not much berry to be found here. The green apple is somewhat tart, but also kind of pleasant because it’s not overpowering as it usually is. Orange is reminiscent of the classic hard candy, and reminds me of the other hard orange candies and lollipops of the 90s. Cherry is probably the favourite in this variety. It’s definitely got the strongest flavour of the variety, and has the distinct cherry candy flavour that kids of the 90s like me would definitely recognize. The flavour is less of a grocery store cherry you’d find, and more of the maraschino cherry you get – those bright red cherries that have been sitting in a scary looking red syrup. While it’s not cherry per se, it’s definitely tasty, and probably why the profile has carried over from as far back as the 1900s. Some things are classics for a reason.

I’ve also noticed, whether intentional or not, cherry is what makes up most of this bag. I’d say the ratio of cherry to other flavours is at least 2 to 1. As in, if the whole bag had 30 pieces, 10 would be the other flavours, and 20 would be cherry. Not that I mind though, since I feel like cherry is the flavour they do the best.