Swedish Fish Jelly Beans

This is going to be a short one, folks. I was so disappointed by these beans that I just can’t spend a whole lot of time and energy dwelling on this review. I love the classic Swedish Fish gummy candy, but these beans are just terrible.

Size and shape

Bean size is all over the board.

No effort at all has been made to resemble a bean shape, and the shape from bean to bean is also completely inconsistent. Some are near-perfect spheres; others are very oblong. Some have very smooth curves, others have angles and flat sections.

I’m still giving a single bean in this category because the average size is just right.

1 out of 5 beans

Chewability

The one bright spot in this review, these beans are about as close to chewability perfection as you can get.

5 out of 5 beans

Texture

Just terrible. Turrible, as Sir Charles would say.

The shell is very grainy. The insides may be, too, but the proportion of shell to insides is too high, so it’s hard to tell if that’s just the grainy shell dominating.

0 out of 5 beans

Taste and flavor

The good news is that they taste pretty close to regular Swedish Fish. The bad news is that, for reasons I can’t explain, I like that flavor much better in gummy form than in jelly bean form.

The other disappointment here is that they only come in a single flavor. I know that Swedish Fish gummies commonly come in only their red flavor, but they DO have other flavors, and I would have appreciated seeing those in here, as well.

4 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

This test is effectively worthless for these beans; I’m not going to score it. I don’t begrudge packages of a single flavor of beans, so I don’t want to unduly hurt the score of these Swedish Fish beans by marking them down.

not scored

Conclusion

This is the first year that I’ve tried Swedish Fish Jelly Beans. Given my aforementioned love for the original gummies, I was very sad to discover how lackluster this entrant into the jelly bean arena is. I will never purchase these again.