Skittles Jelly Beans

One of the marquee new jelly bean releases for 2022 comes from another classic candy brand: Skittles! I was a pretty big fan of Skittles as a kid, but I’ve really not had them often as an adult. They’re a quintessential Halloween candy, but not something I would pick up on a whim to satisfy a needy sweet tooth.

Skittles themselves are pretty close to jelly beans, though they are a bit chewier. It’ll be interesting to see how the beans differ from the originals.

I conducted this review in the company of my dear friend of over 30 years, best man at my wedding, and a fellow connoisseur of sweets, Daniel C. Hodges. I’ll sprinkle his observations throughout. Thanks for the assistance, Daniel!

Size and shape

We start off not with a bang, but more of a sad trombone, as the Skittles jelly beans do not make a good first impression. They were extremely inconsistent, with no attempt made at a proper bean shape. It’s an interesting contrast to classic Skittles, which (in my memory, at least) are one of the most physically consistent candies I’ve encountered.

I really enjoyed this analogy that Daniel came up with: “It’s like seeing a bunch of beanbags floating around in zero gravity – each is vaguely spherical and oblong, but there’s a huge range of sizes, protrusions, and dents.”

He then had the clever idea to break out his calipers and measure the largest and smallest beans we could find. On the longer axis, the largest bean we could find was 17.64 mm long and the smallest bean was a mere 12.39 mm. That makes the largest bean over 42% larger than the smallest!

1 out of 5 beans

Chewability

This category went much better for the Skittles beans, as they were slightly easier than average to chew, from my own experience writing these reviews. On the other hand, Daniel said he found them to be slightly harder to chew than he expected, but not in a bad way. I actually would have liked them to offer a little more oomph, but I was grateful that they were easier to chew than classic Skittles.

4 out of 5 beans

Texture

Texture was a mixed bag. The shells of these jelly beans are not very smooth at all, but they are a good thickness in proportion to the insides. Unfortunately, the shell doesn’t break up into nice hunks, but falls apart quickly. The insides good and smooth, though!

Daniel’s thoughts: “Pretty smooth and homogenous. I only notice any grain when thinking about it, and they’re less grainy than I remember Skittles themselves being.”

3 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

Skittles Jelly Beans feature the same five flavors as the original candies, and they match them pretty well.

Strawberry is the most Skittle-like, classic flavor, and our favorite overall. We found orange to be a very good orange, as artificial orange flavors go. Grape was pretty decent, too. Lemon and lime are weakest of the bunch – “Wholly disappointing,” Daniel says. They lacked the acidity that we both thought necessary for these flavors. He also thought the lime was so weak that it just tasted like refined sugar.

I also note that there was some significant variation between beans of the same flavor, particularly in intensity of flavor.

It’s a very mediocre batch of flavors, overall.

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

Daniel compared the one-of-each experience to “tearing open a fun-size bag of Skittles and dumping them all in your mouth,” but easier to chew, and I found that to be an apt comparison. After a few seconds, it turns into a monoflavor experience, for the most part, but it definitely brings back memories of the same classic Skittles monoflavor.

7 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

This is a decent bag if you like Skittles and also find them too hard to chew, but otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend them very highly.

Thanks again to guest panelist Daniel! It was great to review these with you, and I hope we can do it again next year.