You can still find Jelly Beans in some… unusual places. Not long ago, we picked up a 9-ounce bag of more or less generic beans at our local lumberyard. Well, to call Menards a “lumberyard” is a bit of a misstatement, though they are definitely closer than Orange Hell (Home Depot) and Blue Hell (Lowes). Whatever… the beans we picked up are labeled Quality Products Jelly Beans, and they’re of the variety known as “peg candy” – you see a forest of smallish bags, all with a window so you can buy the product by sight, at lots of convenience stores and low-end groceries. They’re right next to the orange slices and the starlight mints…
In all honesty, these are pretty much indistinguishable from the ten-ounce bags of “Great Value” jelly beans I bought a while back at WalMart: they’re stamped “made in Mexxico” and packaged by Quality Products. A bag is nine ounces of what mostly sugar with eight colors in all, the size you used to see before “gourmet jelly beans” hit the market. They’re so similar to the last bag that I can just copy and paste the list of colors:
White: this has a pineapple (I think) flavor, by which I mean it’s faintly pineapple-flavored.
Black: it’s licorice, of course – and fairly strongly so.
Purple: it is apparently grape, though that’s tough to tell.
Orange: orange-like.
Pink: I have no idea what flavor this is supposed to be.
Red: ummm… nope; maybe a bit on the cherry end of the spectrum.
Green: well, at least it’s not watermelon; and might have a faintly lime flavor.
Yellow: if you try really, really hard you can detect a faint lemony flavor. But you have to try really, really hard!
As is usually the case with peg-candy jelly beans, the colors extend only to the candy shell; inside any bean of any color you;ll find somewhat mushy gel in a translucent off-white. All eight of the colors, with the possible exception of the black licorice, are super-sweet.
They're fairly cheap and, as with “Great Value” beans, the buyer is getting pretty much what he’s paying for. There is one redeeming factor about this brand, though: I spotted a little MRCI logo on the front of the bag – a bit of googling turned up a facility called the Mankato Rehabilitation Center, Inc.: these and many other candies are made in Mexico, shipped to the Minneapolis area (Mankato, MN) and packaged by MRCI, which offers job opportunities to area people with disabilities and disadvantages. Somehow, I don’t think WalMart’s version came to me by way of Minnesota....
In all honesty, these are pretty much indistinguishable from the ten-ounce bags of “Great Value” jelly beans I bought a while back at WalMart: they’re stamped “made in Mexxico” and packaged by Quality Products. A bag is nine ounces of what mostly sugar with eight colors in all, the size you used to see before “gourmet jelly beans” hit the market. They’re so similar to the last bag that I can just copy and paste the list of colors:
White: this has a pineapple (I think) flavor, by which I mean it’s faintly pineapple-flavored.
Black: it’s licorice, of course – and fairly strongly so.
Purple: it is apparently grape, though that’s tough to tell.
Orange: orange-like.
Pink: I have no idea what flavor this is supposed to be.
Red: ummm… nope; maybe a bit on the cherry end of the spectrum.
Green: well, at least it’s not watermelon; and might have a faintly lime flavor.
Yellow: if you try really, really hard you can detect a faint lemony flavor. But you have to try really, really hard!
As is usually the case with peg-candy jelly beans, the colors extend only to the candy shell; inside any bean of any color you;ll find somewhat mushy gel in a translucent off-white. All eight of the colors, with the possible exception of the black licorice, are super-sweet.
They're fairly cheap and, as with “Great Value” beans, the buyer is getting pretty much what he’s paying for. There is one redeeming factor about this brand, though: I spotted a little MRCI logo on the front of the bag – a bit of googling turned up a facility called the Mankato Rehabilitation Center, Inc.: these and many other candies are made in Mexico, shipped to the Minneapolis area (Mankato, MN) and packaged by MRCI, which offers job opportunities to area people with disabilities and disadvantages. Somehow, I don’t think WalMart’s version came to me by way of Minnesota....
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