New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: Reese’s Select Clusters

by Teresa Gubbins

Combination of chocolate, peanut butter, chopped nuts, and caramel is better than one might expect.

Given all the variations and spin-offs Reese's has done, it's no small feat that it keeps devising new products. Which is why, regardless of how you feel about Reese's basic flavor combo (seems like people either love or hate chocolate + peanut) or the quality of its products, it is at least interesting for its innovativeness.

Introduced this summer (but only just discovered at SuperTarget): Reese's Select Clusters, a sort of high-end version of the Reese's cup in a turtle-cluster type format, with peanut butter and milk chocolate plus caramel, peanuts, and pecans.

This was an 8-ounce bag, holding approximately 15 pieces, each piece in its own wrapper. A serving consists of three pieces, for a total of 220 calories, 13 grams of fat (7 saturated), and 24g carbohydrate. The first ingredient was milk chocolate, followed by peanuts, sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, high-fructose corn syrup, and then a bunch of 2% stuff including butter, cocoa, and whey.

Reese's is Hershey from whom you don't exactly expect top-quality chocolate. You won't get that with the Select Cluster; but it was a half-decent approximation of a cluster with a chocolate shell enclosing a center disc of peanut buttery-type cream on top of a bed of chopped nuts topped by a puck of caramel.

If it's nuts you're after, this will disappoint; the nuts were chopped into small bits and there weren't a lot of them. But the chocolate coating was real not fake, and was quick to melt -- on the inside of the wrapper, on your hands. What came on strongest was the peanut butter and caramel, which had a creamy, gooey consistency, rather than stiff or hard. (Maybe that's why the ingredients included HFCS.)

The pieces looked different from one another, which made them seem less mass-produced.

At heart, they're a pretty close cousin to the Reese’s Cup with Caramel introduced in 2005, but with more nut pieces and, for marketing purposes, a completely different format to create the impression that this is a fine, gourmet item.

In addition to listing ingredients, the back of the bag also says that these were made in Mexico, and that they are part of "a new line of deliciously different yet familiar products", which possibly means more coming our way.

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