Maynards – Tropical Swedish Berries

As someone who grew up with Swedish Berries, and also Swedish Fish when the berries weren’t available, I’ve got a wealth of experience when it comes to these sugar morsels. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t love these, and yet at the same time, couldn’t really tell you exactly which berry its supposed to be. All we can really agree on is the distinct, sugary flavour that these imprint on our young, impressionable minds as kids.

Veering away from the typical, this tropical inspired mix has four flavours – tropical island, passion fruit, pina colada and beachy punch. I find it kind of humorous that they deviate further and further away from using fruit names, probably because they can get away with some crazier stuff. I for one have no idea what tropical islands are supposed to taste like. I assume it’s a lot of sand and grit, but not sure what the flavour itself is. Also beachy punch is a weird combination of words to me. Berry punch, or beachy berry would be fine, but berry punch?

I guess I should also mention I tend to be a bit averse to tropical mixes because the flavours just don’t seem to draw me in. I can’t say what specifically it is, but it’s just not something I look at and get excited about.

Let’s start with the orange coloured one, or what they refer to as tropical island. The good news is there’s no sand or sand flavour as far as I can tell. It has a tropical quality to it for sure, and if I were to guess what the most prominent flavour is, I’d say it’s some sort of mango. There are some other flavours that make it feel more tropical than just a straight forward mango, but to keep things simple I’m just going to refer to it as mango. Not bad if you like that tropical flavour profile.

The purple one is passion fruit and this one feels like it tries to be passion fruit, but doesn’t really get there. But that I mean it has the qualities of passion fruit like the distinct floral flavour, but it seems to be a bit subdued near the end by what I’m guessing is the sheer sugar sweetness of the candy itself. I would prefer if the passion fruit flavour came through stronger, but it’s going to be a common theme that the sugar bombs have a sweetness that overpowers all else.

Next up is the white one that represents pina colada. Let’s be real and call this what it is – pineapple. I don’t really know the reason that companies market pineapple as pina colada, but I suspect it gives them more leeway to make it taste less like actual pineapples and work with colours apart from yellow. Either way, this piece is very distinctly pineapple and you’d be hard pressed to confuse it for anything else. When you think of white gummy bears, you think of this flavour. It’s probably my favourite of the assortment, as I imagine it will be for many.

Finally we have the pink one representing beachy punch. This one is interesting, because the flavour is exactly like a specific Skittles flavour I’ve had before. Unfortunately I can’t remember off the top of my head which flavour it is, or even with assortment it was from. I want to say it was melon berry?

All of these have the same texture which errs a little too much on the sticky side. I guess if I think back on what I remember as Swedish Berries, they were a bit sticky, but they were more of a fruit snack type of texture where it was soft in the middle but still gummy enough that it didn’t get stuck everywhere. That may also have been me leaving them in open air for too long and letting them get stale (sometimes on purpose) to avoid that. As it is now, these are quite sticky once you start chewing into them, and I don’t remember them being so. It’s fun to play around with them in the mouth for a few seconds, but it gets old fast and sticky just as quick.

While I don’t think I’ve outgrown Swedish Berries just yet, not sure I want to invest too much time into this mix. It isn’t bad, but if I wanted a cheap tropical candy, I’d probably opt for something else like gummies, rather than these using the brand cache of Swedish Berries. If I was younger and had more general quota to down all that sugar, sure why not. But alas, time has not been kind to me.