GUMMY BLOG 3: Sweet Smiles :)

Sometimes life can really surprise you. When I first started to do a blog rating and reviewing Gummy Bears I thought it would just be for fun and I would be the only one who actually read the thing! Now as I sit down to write my second installment I can see I was 100% correct! This isn’t one of those times life surprised me…not even a little bit!  So, where am I going with this? I have no idea but if it’s true that “You can never get enough of what you don`t need to make you happy” then this blog certainly won’t help, and it sure can’t hurt so you might as well read on for my review of “Sweet Smiles Gummi Bears.”

Sweet Smiles Gummi Bears, made in the good ol’ USA, are distributed by Dolgencorp, LLC in Goodlettsville TN. They are Fat Free...

and they contain Carnauba Wax which is essential in any decent Gummy Bears. If you purchase Gummies without Carnauba Wax in the ingredients or Beeswax you probably just wasted your money.

photo from Wikipedia

Carnauba, by the way,  is from Brazil and in its pure state, usually comes in the form of hard yellow-brown flakes (shown above). Carnauba puts a glossy finish on candy and food products. It’s the same stuff used in car wax, furniture wax, surfboard wax, cosmetics, shoe polish and the list goes on and on.  There I gave the health food crowd something to get all worked up about! Now you can tell everyone that not only are Gummies bad because of the sugar but also because you’re eating shoe polish! (Gimme a break!)

Considering I purchased these in a dollar store and there was virtually no graphics on the bag I really thought these were going to be the absolute bottom of the gummy barrel.  I was ready to really bash ‘em  on here (smush 'em?)  but I was actually in for a treat! Oh, there’s that occasional “surprise” I alluded to at the start of this blog!

These bears were really tasty!  I can’t say much for their texture though. They were a lot better than the  “Nice” gummies but they still felt a little too jelly-like.  Still, they had decent consistency and didn’t have that greasy feel you sometimes find in cheap gummy candy.

But WOW! These things are packed with flavor and its quality flavor! The Lemmon tastes like lemon! The cherry tastes like cherry! The pineapple REALLY tastes like pineapple! The snozzberries  taste like snozzberries!! (woops…forgive the Wonka reference! I got excited!) 

The sculpting on the bears is the typical tumorous looking brick of gelatin that we are all familiar with and which closely mimics the original Gummy Bear design and that's a good thing!

Other winning qualities are the pleasant, waxy, plastic feel to them and the fact that they are a little plumper than some other brand Gummy Bears. In an attempt to make these things cuter than they need to be though I think they made the bear faces look a little too piggish. A matter of fact (obscure references coming) their faces remind me a little of  Canadian cartoonist  Dave Sim’s character, Cerebus, which is an aardvark but doesn’t look  at all like an aardvark!  Now THIS guy looks like a proper aardvark!

Anyone remember him?  Sim’s aardvark looks more like a pig who looks more like these bears! Did you follow that!? Am I completely wrong? A little right? Check this out! Especially look at the eyes and the end of the snout

So, what more can I say? Did I leave anything out? These are good! They’re real good!

My final grade for Sweet Smiles is a solid B- They get the minus for the boring and unusually tall packaging. It's 9 inches top to bottom, I guess to make it look like you’re getting more than you really are. One inch of that bag is just crimped plastic on top for the store hangers! But hey, this is a minor peccadillo because they do this with everything these days from cereal to potato chips to socks and cameras to you name it!

I'd link you to the Sweet Smiles gummy candy web site but it seems like they are the only brand in the known universe without an Internet address! Weird! You can send 'em a fan letter though: Dolgencorp, LLC 100 Mission Ridge Goodlettsville, TN 37072. 

OK, I’ll be back next week or maybe sooner or maybe later with the next Gummy Bear review! Thanks for reading (I say to myself!)