Favorite Day Jelly Beans

Welcome to the eighth season premiere for A Boy and His Beans! Despite the dwindling number of available jelly beans I have yet to review, I think we have some pretty interesting stuff coming up this year.

First up is another store brand, this time from Target: Favorite Day Jelly Beans.

Size and shape

There’s not much nice to say about this category for Target. Inconsistency, of both size and shape, is the order of the (favorite) day.

The smallest ones are just about in my sweet spot for size, so the largest ones are at least double that by volume.

The typical shape is more egg-like than bean-like, but some of them do clearly have an attempt at a dimple, so it’s a weird middle ground between beans and bird eggs.

2 out of 5 beans

Chewability

These beans chew well, for the most part. The majority are neither too firm nor too soft, but a few outliers do require extra chewing force, for unknown reasons.

4 out of 5 beans

Texture

Texture is middling across the whole cross-section of bean. The shells are not very smooth and slightly too thick, but they do break apart into good-sized hunks. The insides could also be smoother, but they aren’t what I would call grainy.

3 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

Favorite Day Jelly Beans feature eight classic jelly bean flavors, including my beloved licorice. Unfortunately, they don’t feature great tasting flavors. None of the flavors really sing out above the base generic sweetness, and there’s a clear aftertaste of artificial flavoring with nearly every bean. And, of course, there isn’t a hint of acidity to be found anywhere, which longtime readers know is something I consider crucial to really good fruit jelly bean flavors.

It’s a good thing that licorice was probably the flavor present in the highest quantity, because that’s the main one I want to keep coming back to.

5 out of 10 beans

The one-of-each test

Perhaps the ultimate test of a bag of jelly beans is how enjoyable it is to take one of each flavor and eat them all at the same time.¹

I deliberately picked out the most modest specimens of the seven fruit-flavored beans here, and even then it was quite a challenge to chew through the lot, given their above-average size and hearty shells. The flavors, not being very distinct from one another to begin with, melted rapidly into a uniflavor of little more than refined sugar. Not a very good test for these beans, in any way.

1 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

Target’s Favorite Day Jelly Beans wind up being an inauspicious start to the season, but looking forward to more interesting things to come!