Jelly Belly: Cold Stone Creamery

Hello, jelly bean lovers, and welcome to the sixth season of A Boy and His Beans!

Taking a peek behind the curtain, it’s getting harder and harder to find new varieties of jelly beans that I haven’t reviewed (or don’t overlap with the flavors in past reviews of the same brand). If anyone out there knows of places that make jelly beans in-house but don’t distribute them nationally, do please get in touch and let me know about them.

Kicking things off this year is another co-branded package from Jelly Belly, featuring flavors based on the Cold Stone Creamery line of ice cream shops. Though I haven’t been to one in years, I do have fond memories of them. My go-to combo was their Sweet Cream flavored ice cream with a mix-in of gummy bears, but that was my own creation, and the flavors in this pack are based on Cold Stone’s own Signature Creations™.

As before, because Jelly Belly beans are so amazingly consistent in their size, shape, chewability, and texture, I will refer you to my reviews of Jelly Belly Snapple and Sours for details on those categories.

Size and shape

4 out of 5 beans

Chewability

2 out of 5 beans

Texture

5 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

This collection of flavors is really delightful and has surprising depth. I think they do a great job of capturing the interesting array of flavor combos that one can get when they get a Cold Stone ice cream creation.

Chocolate Devotion is the most one-note flavor in the bag, since its namesake ice cream creation is just made up of a bunch of different forms of chocolate. I detect the fudge aspect of the flavor most prominently.

Mint Mint Chocolate Chocolate Chip tastes about exactly like you’d expect – mint chocolate chip ice cream in jelly bean form.

Apple Pie à la Cold Stone is pleasant, but leans heavily on the pie aspect. The apple part is pretty subtle. I would have really liked to get a little hint of green apple tartness, which I find essential to cutting the sweetness in a real life apple pie, but there is no tartness to be found.

I was surprised with how much I enjoyed Birthday Cake Remix, because cake batter is not an ice cream flavor I ever purposefully choose, but it is definitely a unique inclusion in this array of flavors. It captures the cake batter flavor quite well, but the advertised brownie and fudge mix-ins are not coming through.

Finally, Our Strawberry Blonde is the hands-down favorite. It initially bursts with strong strawberry flavor, and follows that up with the clear presence of the graham cracker and whipped cream elements. The caramel is a bit harder to identify.

While all tasted great, I do wish that there was a bit more variety in the five Signature Creations that they chose to feature here. Three of them included brownie and fudge mix-in components. I would have liked to see at least one of those swapped out for another that didn’t involve chocolate, like Cheesecake Fantasy or Peanut Butter Pretzel Time.

8 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

Five Jelly Belly beans are just about perfect in terms of what one can comfortably chew.

These flavors are all very good individually, but when taken all together, the individual elements fail to stand out from each other. The amalgamated flavor ends up being mostly chocolate and cake batter. The strawberry, which was the only fruity or acidic note in the whole bag, gets completely overwhelmed. The mint barely hangs on, depending on where it lands on the teeth and tongue.

It’s not a bad experience to eat one of each together, but as noted before, I wish there were some more fruit elements or wild cards like peanut butter to round out the bag and the one-of-each test.

5 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

Jelly Belly comes in with a strong showing for this season six premiere! I applaud their ability to emulate the interesting ice cream creations of Cold Stone Creamery.

Looking back on over 5 years of these reviews now, one does have to marvel at Jelly Belly’s seemingly endless ability to come up with interesting new flavors and capture them accurately in a package so tiny as a jelly bean. I’m sure they have lots of flavor ideas that they try and discard, but the amount of success they have is remarkable.

Here’s to another great jelly bean season!