New product Wednesday, in Dallas stores: Raspberry 3 Musketeers

by Teresa Gubbins

Penny appears in photo to provide reference point as to the size of the raspberry 3M mini which, as can be seen in photo, is small.

Please forgive candy as a new product two weeks in a row but there's a certain urgency re: 3 Musketeers Raspberry minis with dark chocolate, being as they are 1. seasonal and 2. limited edition. Time sensitive!

Unlike Kit Kats or Hershey's kisses which have endured endless spinoffs, 3 Musketeers have just begun to be exploited, starting last year with mint 3 Musketeers, which have become a permanent flavor, followed by Limited Edition Cherry 3 Musketeers, sold during Valentine's. The flavoring shows up in the filling, and you can rest assured that said flavoring is not what one would call "natural".

Here for Easter (or, alternately, "spring" -- the bag says "Bring the spring feeling home" -- for heathens who don't observe Easter?) comes raspberry with dark-chocolate coating and a pale purply-pink interior. They're OK-not-bad, assuming you can hack 3 Musketeers' standard marshmallowy nougat filling and its fakey Sweet-Tart-type "fruit" flavor.

Spring, tulips, Easter, bunnies -- which, by the way, Mars tests its products on. Yum.

Mars, who makes 3 Musketeers -- as well as M&M's, Snickers, Twix, Dove, Starburst, and Skittles -- turned up in the news in December 2007, when it came out that they do cruel animal testing in their research of flavonoids for their drecky CocoaVia product line. (CocoaVia is a potential huge money-maker because its claims of being "healthy" give free rein to chocoholics to pig out.) Animal-rights supporter Pam Anderson wrote Mars a letter asking them to follow Hershey's example and end the testing, and PETA is also on the case, urging a boycott; though there are probably more people who avoid Mars only because their candy doesn't taste that good.