Kev's Snack Reviews

Todays review is a face off...well...a jelly baby off between the new Tropical flavour Jelly Babies from Maynards Bassetts vs the Original Jelly Babies. It seems incomprehensible that a new variety could beat the originals, so this will be interesting! Firstly, I must mention the new name: Jelly Babies were originally labelled as Bassetts, but Mondelez have put both the Maynards brand (which is on things like Wine Gums and Sports Mixture) and Bassetts (which includes the likes of Liquorice Allsorts - who can forget the character Bertie Bassett?) I'm not sure it's a good idea to lump two brands together like this, but I guess it fits with Mondelez' marketing strategy of making everything the same. First up, the Tropical Jelly Babies. These come in mango, pineapple and BANANA (ooh!) flavours so straight off they are at a disadvantrage of containing less variety than the Originals, despite the fancy flavours. But are they good flavours? Yes, they are as it turns out!...

Whilst at Tesco recently I found these new Jelly Babies Berry Mix, and like the Cadbury Eclairs Velvets Coffee Flavour they're a Tesco Exclusive. They're basically the berry flavours from regular Jelly Babies in their own bag...nothing all that new or exciting really. The babies have some odd names..."Brilliant", "Big Heart" and "Baby Bonny" and the flavours are blackcurrant, raspberry and what seems to be strawberry, although the ingredients also list apple so it's hard to tell. They tasted pleasant enough but not particularly "berry-ish", if there is such a word...just very sweet. To be honest I wasn't that enamoured with them, they were a bit one-dimensional without the green, yellow, orange etc jelly babies. I wanted some citrus flavours to liven things up a bit! Overall I felt these were a bit of a letdown, and a lazy way for Mondelez to repackage an existing product (which seems to be happening a lot recently...