New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: Young & Smylie licorice

by Teresa Gubbins

What Hershey has done for chocolate it's now doing for licorice with Young & Smylie licorice, a new line with three not-that-licoricey flavors: strawberry, traditional black, and peach-mango.

Young & Smylie licorice won't bring smiley to your face.

"Young & Smylie" is a name that Hershey revived, from "Y&S", a company it acquired in 1977 (whose history is documented here). Hershey drug up the old name for this new pricey line ($2.99 for an 8-oz package), and this press release snippet pinpoints its target audience:

"Young & Smylie celebrates consumers' love of traditional licorice with exciting flavors that appeal to today's sophisticated palates. People looking for a grown-up candy to match their grown-up tastes will appreciate the craftsmanship and authenticity that Young & Smylie has delivered since the 19th century."

So basically: adults who don't want to be seen buying Twizzlers.

The idea of an adult licorice -- one with potent flavor and pleasing texture -- sounds great. The retro packaging creates a good impression. So does the seal proclaiming it's "made with real licorice root extract".

While licorice comes in salty varieties as well as sweet, with both hard texture and soft, this is Australian-style, which means the licorice is soft and sweet, and cut bite-size logs.

Get to it already

In Australian fashion, these are soft, all right. They stick to your teeth -- not pulling out your fillings but lingering longer than you want them to, like boring passive guests at a party who you wish would just leave.

More disappointing was the horrid taste. The black was the least-bad with its tiny licorice jolt. But the two fruit options were gross -- as fake and plasticky as any crappy kid product, with a nauseating sickly-sweet aroma, a jittery effect from the sugar, and a dreadful waxy aftertaste. Worse, the flavor turned rancid after the (resealable) package had been open a week or two, with soybean oil (see ingredients below) rising to become dominant. Awful.

Your basic Starbursts are a fascinating culinary experience next to this stuff. It's all the more disappointing given the expectations raised by the presentation.

Time for the ingredient list

Note that there is less than 2% licorice root extract.

No wonder this stuff doesn't have any personality. Was licorice root extract too expensive to mess with in anything other than marginal quantities? Or is the aesthetic at Hershey just so unflaggingly mediocre that they're intrinsically incapable of putting out anything good?