Bait and Switch in Jellybeanland

38th Street Snacks Jelly Beans

I was in the local "fresh foods" grocery last week and found a display of a brand of beans I'd never seen before. Given that the 11-ounce bags were on sale (marked down from $3.99 to $3.00), what was a jellybean fiend to do: ignore them? So I tossed them in my cart, figuring that they must be some sort of gourmet product. The plain bag, simple label, and "designer" price tag all convinced me that I'd be buying some sort of specialty brand when I picked up a pack of 38th Street Snacks Jelly Beans.

Boy, had I been tricked! The printing on the back label (underneath the required-by-law ingredients list) informed me that the beans had been "carefully selected for KeHE Distributors LLC, Naperville, IL." Google maps, however, says that there's no 38th Street in Naperville... but that's neither here nor there. Instead of being a specialty brand, however; KeHE is a major grocery distributor with more than a dozen distribution centers across North America. More to the point, the beans had been manufactured in Mexico.

Now where had I seen that before? Oh, yeah: on a Brach's bag... made by the Ferrara Candy Company in Mexico. Once I opened the bag, I realized that I'd been hornswoggled: instead of some sort of specialty, small-batch candy (as one might expect from the "hand-printed" label, I'd paid about twice the going rate for some of the same mass-produced beans you can buy at many gas stations. Yup, six "flavors" of candy shell on a neutral-flavored white gummy center – not unlike the stuff in the big multicolor bags. The sole difference (other than price) is that the 38th Street beans seem to have a more intense flavor in the shell. The centers, though, are no different. As for "carefully selected"? I found half a dozen loose chunks of shell and/or partial beans. Nothing "careful" there!

Instead of paying $3.99 for 11 ounces (that works out to $5.80 per pound) for overpriced, generic-quality jellybeans; you might as well buy a bag of the same beans you've been getting for decades. Call me underwhelmed: two stars for bait-and-switch.

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