Wednesday, September 24, 2008
New product Wednesday, at Dallas-area stores: Hershey’s Pumpkin Spice kisses
Hershey's Pumpkin Spice kisses have creamy center.
Last year at this time, Hershey's put out its first fall-Halloween-type limited-edition kiss, Candy Corn. This year, they've added two more fall-Halloween-type limited-edition flavors, including Pumpkin Spice.
The packaging is appealing: orange foil with tiger stripes and a brown paper flag that says "pumpkin spice". The kiss itself has a butterscotch-orange shell with a soft white center; it's all vaguely white-chocolate-y, though it's not especially like chocolate at all. The only connection to chocolate is that the ingredients state that cocoa butter might be present.
The flavor evokes the spices typically used in pumpkin pie (though it's not as if cinnamon or clove is on the ingredient list which includes sugar, vegetable oil, nonfat milk, corn syrup, whey, plus some other minor ingredients).
But more than flavor, what sticks out with this kiss is the buttery texture; it's exceedingly soft, not hard like a regular milk-chocolate kiss (or like the Candy Corn kisses introduced last year). These are so soft that they melt in your mouth before you can decide whether you like the flavor or not. Some sites have found them to be so irksomely soft that they melted by the time they got home.
The other fall-Halloween-type limited edition flavor, not found at my SuperTarget, is called Caramel Apple.
Fezziwig says:
I really like pumpkin spice flavor generally, but the softness of these things makes them sound pretty awful. Bleh. Still, I am glad to know about them. By the way, Theresa, I am sure you saw the recent editorial in the DMN about "premium" M&M's. I felt very smug to have known about them months before.
Anonymous
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JKarlo21 says:
They had these for samples at Target a couple of weeks ago. They taste just like pumpkin pie. They are AWESOME!! Yes, we bought a bag of them and set them out for guests to enjoy. Definitely recommend.
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Jason Rice says:
Fezziwig... yeah, and I feel so ... no offense TG... trivial reading these. But they're among my favorite features of Peg.
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Teresa Gubbins says:
"smug" and "trivial" are about the nicest things you could say. i'm touched.
i know that new products can superficially seem trivial but i like looking at them as indicators of various aspects of popular culture. i'm sure that sounds ridiculously pompous but for me, it's about more than just "oh a new flavor". i like to know how these flavors are conceived, and how they market the products, and how flavors influence other companies to follow suit.
on this one in particular, the fact that innovative companies like Starbucks and Jack in the Box have in previous years introduced pumpkin-flavored products is, to me, no coincidence
Staff
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frankstongal says:
smug and trivial tastes good. always, pumpkin.
Anonymous
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luniz says:
in other words, TG = candy nerd.
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Collin Gouldin says:
not just candy, also Jack in the Box...
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Billusa99 says:
Nice mood lighting on the counter, TG.
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ch0 says:
Wash this down with some Pepsi Spice!
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Fezziwig says:
Re: Teresa's comment about how products reflect trends in popular culture... that is exactly what the DMN editorial was about: the "premiumization" of our retail economy. I completely agree that these trends do say a lot about where we are going. Which is why I love to read about them!
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