Starburst Jelly Beans: Ice Cream Flavors

Starburst Jelly Beans: Ice Cream Flavors packaging
Image credit: Walmart.com

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

Flavors

  • :strawberry: Strawberry
  • :orange: Orange Sherbet
  • :heart: Red Raspberry
  • :lemon: Lemon Sorbet

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

Category Score
Size and shape 4/5 beans
Chewability 5/5 beans
Texture 4/5 beans
Taste and flavor 6/10 beans
One-of-each test 8/10 beans
Total 27/35 beans

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.


  1. This test is specific to fruit flavors only. While non-fruit flavors like licorice or buttered popcorn may be welcome, they are exempt from this test. Because that’s just nasty.