Starburst Jelly Beans: Ice Cream Flavors

Next up to bat, another variety of a very popular brand of jelly beans: Starburst’s Ice Cream Flavors.

In the technical categories, I expect results consistent with my previous reviews of Starburst jelly beans (Original, Crazy Beans, and Sour).

Though this doesn’t officially affect any scores, I must note for the record that there was only a dozen, at most, orange beans in this bag. Given that there are only four flavors, this is far under the roughly 1-in-4 proportion that it should be.

On to the review.

Size and shape

No surprises here. I still think they’re slightly small, but on the whole, Starburst consistently does well in this category.

4 out of 5 beans

Chewability

Starburst consistently does well in size and shape, but they consistently knock it out of the park in chewability. For the fourth time, a bag of Starburst beans is awarded a perfect subscore in this category.

5 out of 5 beans

Texture

In the most recent Starburst Jelly Beans review, I demoted their texture score to 3, on account of the shell being too grainy on breakup. That must’ve been a phenomenon isolated to that bag or that variety, because I don’t have that problem with these Ice Cream beans, and I didn’t have it with the first two varieties. These beans are equally deserving of the 4 I gave to those first two.

4 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

And now we’re on to the meat of this review.

Starburst has always done well, if not excelled, in the taste and flavor category, so I was looking forward to seeing what they did with some less-conventional flavors. The funny thing is, I never read the actual bean flavors when buying the bag, and I was disappointed to realize that three out of four of these Flavors are just variants on classic Starburst flavors.

Still, they taste good, and they made a solid effort to make them actually resemble ice cream, sherbet, or sorbet. They have a bit of milkiness to them. I feel like I pick up a bit of coconut in the strawberry, but there doesn’t appear to be any coconut derivatives in the ingredients. Not being a fan of coconut, this is a slight turnoff, but I understand how it adds to the “ice cream” effect of the flavor.

I think this is a first for a review here: I’m going to dock a bean for the fact that the colors of the strawberry and red raspberry beans are so close that they’re indistinguishable without taking a very close look. This is pretty annoying when you’re trying to reach for a specific flavor. And we’re not talking Gimbal’s 41 flavors here. There are four flavors in this bag. Coulda made just a little more effort there, Starburst.

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

Four beans on the smaller side never fill the mouth as much as I would like, but the flavors complement each other very well, and Starburst’s stellar chewability makes for an effortless test. There’s a good balance of acidity from the lemon sorbet and red raspberry and creaminess from the orange sherbet and strawberry.

8 out of 10 beans

Conclusion

Another solid effort by Starburst. Most likely, I’d reach for the Originals or the Sours before these, but a lot of that is my personal bias toward acidity. This is a unique, if modestly so, bag that any jelly bean lover should try.