Peeps Jelly Beans

It’s an exciting day here on A Boy and His Beans as we witness the marriage of jelly beans with another classic Easter candy, Peeps!

I enjoy marshmallow in all forms, and my father instilled in me a love of Peeps, specifically, from an early age. He and I like to open a package of them and let them sit for a day or two to get a little bit firmer before eating them.

Let’s see if these Peeps Jelly Beans live up to their namesake!

Size and shape

The average size of these beans is just right, and they don’t vary much. Maybe one out of every six or so is noticeably undersized, but none are noticeably oversized.

Shape was a bit more disappointing. Most of them have an attempted dimple, but they don’t make for convincing beans. They frequently have more than one dimple, flattened sides, or pointy protrusions.

3 out of 5 beans

Chewability

For the third review in a row, we have a set of jelly beans that rate highly in this category. Peeps Jelly Beans have a good, but not perfect chewability. Once you get through the average shell, the elastic-y insides are just a bit too easy to chew.

4 out of 5 beans

Texture

These beans have a good shell texture that is smooth at the outset and throughout the breakup. It could be a bit thicker, but it’s fine as is.

The insides, however, I am not a fan of at all. They may be intentionally taking their inspiration from the texture of marshmallows, but the net effect is more reminiscent of bubble gum. As mentioned above, they chew very elastically, which adds to the bubble gum effect.

2 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

From 36 flavors to… four.

Four is at the bottom end of what I would consider to be an acceptable diversity of flavors in a package of jelly beans, and frankly, one of these shouldn’t even count. Plain marshmallow is given its own jelly bean flavor, but (1) all of the flavors incorporate marshmallow already, and (2) there’s no such thing as a plain marshmallow Peep in the first place. Is is a darn good Marshmallow jelly bean, though, which one should expect from the Peeps brand.

Lemon, Strawberry, and Blueberry do a good job with that incorporation of marshmallow flavor, but the distinction between each fruit aspect is pretty subtle. These are not big flavors. (To be fair [To be faaaaiiir!], the different flavors of the original Peeps candy are barely distinguishable. Let us not speak of some of the newer, more adventurous Peeps variants.) Despite the subtlety, Lemon and Strawberry do a good job representing their fruits, while Blueberry is less successful.

I will also commend them for being one of the few jelly beans I’ve encountered where the flavor is present on the outside of the shell, tasteable without biting into it. Overall, though, I’m pretty ambivalent about the taste and flavor of these beans.

6 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

Given that the marriage of fruit and marshmallow is the raison d’être of Peeps candy, I will make an exception to the above-linked footnote and include the non-fruit Marshmallow flavor in this review’s one-of-each test.

The beans all work fine together, but it’s not an exciting experience. As you might expect, marshmallow is the dominant taste. The fruit aspects all blend together into an almost perfume-y mish-mash. They don’t retain their individuality at all.

5 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

As we have seen in the past, some candy brands’ jelly bean mashups make great sense, while others just feel like a cash grab. Peeps Jelly Beans are perfectly fine, if you’re into marshmallow, but they aren’t good enough to justify their existence to me. On the spectrum between Swedish Fish Jelly Beans and SweeTarts Jelly Beans, they definitely land closer to the bottom (Swedish Fish and Smarties) than the top (SweeTarts and Nerds).

Peeps fans, you probably want to check these out at least once, but I kinda doubt they’re going to make anyone’s must-buy list every year.