Jelly Bean Factory Gourmet Jelly Beans

Today’s review will be a shorter one, but a happy one.

Those who follow closely may recall that we’ve reviewed multiple sets that are manufactured by Cloetta Ireland, Ltd. – more commonly known as The Jelly Bean Factory. These include:

• Trader Joe’s Gourmet Jelly Beans
• Trader Joe’s Sour Jelly Beans
• Crazy Candy Co. Gourmet Jelly Beans
• Waterbridge Gourmey Jelly Beans
• Waterbridge Sour Jelly Beans

Now, I have finally had the opportunity to purchase the real deal: Jelly Bean Factory Gourmet Jelly Beans! I was lucky to be able to visit Ireland last year and find a large selection of them in the Dublin airport on our way home.

As the physical characteristics are the same as previous iterations manufactured by this same company, refer back to those reviews for details on those categories, but we can still talk flavors.

I was a little dissappointed to find that this group of “36 huge flavors” has major overlap with the 36 flavors included in the Waterbridge assortment. Only four new flavors have been swapped in here.

First, let’s look at what got cut. These four flavors that were in the Waterbridge package are not in the Jelly Bean Factory package:

• Café Latte
• Cinnamon
• Licorice
• Mint Sorbet

I’m not sad to see Cinnamon and Mint Sorbet go, but I thought the Café Latte was good and I really love Licorice, so that’s a half-bummer. If I had my druthers, I’d rather have given Coconut and Butterscotch the boot.

The four new flavors we have traded in are:

• Forest Fruits
• Cherry Blossom Soda
• Salted Caramel
• Peach Bubble Tea

Cherry Blossom Soda is my favorite of the bunch. It deftly combines cherry fruit and floral aspects, with a hint of vanilla that I think points to the soda aspect.

It may be a European turn of phrase, bu I gather that “forest fruits” is generally used to refer to berries of all kinds, and I would say that the flavor captured here does taste like what we’d normally call “mixed berry” here in the States.

Salted Caramel is fine, but perhaps slightly too aggressive with the salt.

Unfortunately, I can’t say with certainty that I actually got a Peach Bubble Tea in the 339 grams of beans I acquired. That’s one of the downsides of flavor assortments this large – if the randomization process isn’t really good, you may just miss out on a number of flavors in a given bag.

Another factor is that inevitably some of the coloring of the beans will look the same when you have so many flavors. Cherry Blossom Soda is depicted on the packaging as white with red flecks, while Peach Bubble Tea is depicted as white with orange flecks, and it may be that I can’t actually tell them apart, both visually and gustatorily.

Conclusion

As always, Jelly Bean Factory-manufactured beans are highly recommended, continuing to carry the distinction as the best we’ve ever seen on this site!