Honey Barbecue Lay's Potato Chips

My bag didn't look like this - it has an actual photo of the chips, a sliced potato in the background, and a bowl of honey and barbecue sauce with a basting brush with sauce on it in the foreground. Anyway.

I had high hopes for these chips - you see "Honey Barbecue" and you think tangy, sweet, a little spicy, right? When it came down to it, though, there wasn't much going on. Not only was the barbecue sauce taste fairly ordinary, it was way too heavy on a smoky, mesquite kind of flavor which I just wasn't a huge fan of. Mesquite is fine on its own, I guess, but this isn't a bag of mesquite chips. Something with "honey solids" in it, as listed in the ingredients, should have a honey flavor somewhere; I couldn't find it. The mesquite wore off a bit as I got farther down in the bag, and there was a bit more of a tangy flavor to the chips near the end, but it shouldn't take that long.

More to the point, I guess I just expect more out of Lay's. We're talking the biggest chip brand in the world - if they do a Honey Barbecue chip, shouldn't it really knock that taste out of the park? Instead it was barely even close. For the most part these just tasted like any barbecue potato chips I could have gotten in any bag, with any brand name on the front, in any store in America. They were a genuine disappointment.

Pepsi Throwback

Much has been made in recent years of the evils of high fructose corn syrup, with claims made about its more negative health effects than "regular" sugar and a vocal subset of cane sugar fans who insist that sodas made with their standard-bearer just taste better. I don't have any particular interest in getting in the middle of either of those debates (I go back and forth on cane sugar, due to its extremely distinctive taste), but it's interesting to see a company of Pepsi's stature giving some play to the whole debate by releasing "throwback" editions of its two biggest brands, Pepsi and Mountain Dew, to a national audience. There's something about "throwback" which implies that things were better before, and one wonders what Pepsi might do if this new edition proves popular. (At least they learned the lesson of New Coke and didn't try to completely supplant their existing product. As it is I've yet to find Pepsi Throwback outside of grocery stores in the Chicago area; not a convenience store I've been in has carried the stuff.)

Pepsi doesn't specify the provenance of the "natural sugar" found in Throwback. Assuming it's sucrose, sugar cane is the most likely source, but as I said above I usually find cane sugar to have a distinctive "caney" taste, which I didn't notice in Throwback (though cola always does the best job of hiding any distinctiveness in the taste of its sweetener, so it's not out of the question).

Regardless of where the sugar comes from, it does its job. As outlined by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, Pepsi's sweetness relative to Coke was the key factor in its winning sip-based taste tests in the 1980s despite being less popular as an overall brand (as Gladwell notes, when you're taking home a two-liter bottle of the stuff, you're possibly not looking for the same things that you're looking for in a sip or two of it). Coke's more distinctive flavor and less overpowering sweetness - in spite of its use of HFCS - have allowed it to maintain more brand loyalty. But by taking out the HFCS, Pepsi Throwback starts to taste, well, a lot more like Coke.

Pepsi Throwback ranks right up there with the best of the mass-market colas. It has a cleaner taste than Pepsi itself because of the lack of corn syrup, and while it doesn't have Coke's trademark tang, it actually has a deeper, more complex cola flavor. (Coke is also more syrupy, although not hugely so. But I found it odd in comparing the two how relatively light the cola taste of Coke was. Pepsi Throwback's is much darker and richer, for lack of better words. I'm not sure if that's what a mass audience wants from their cola, but it's out there.)

Will Pepsi Throwback last? I don't know. It's hard to see it picking off committed Coke drinkers, and if Pepsi drinkers prefer it because of the sweetness, it's hard to see them switching to a cleaner, drier alternative. People who really like the taste of the kola nut and find HFCS too sweet should flock to it if the word gets out, but how many cola drinkers does that describe? Probably not enough to save Pepsi Throwback from its likely fate as a limited edition, but the increasing national popularity of HFCS alternatives at least gives it a chance.

Life Savers Gummies: Island Fruits

Life Savers Gummies tend to be among the better gummy spinoffs; they're usually quite flavorful and the flavors themselves are chosen well. Island Fruits, the latest iteration, follows well in the footsteps of its predecessors. There are four flavors - strawberry kiwi, mango melon, fruit punch and pineapple - and all four manage to be at least solid. One thing I find with tropical flavors is that there's almost always one (at least) that I don't care for in the bunch, but here that's not really the case.

Mango melon isn't spectacular - melon is always a pretty weak flavor, and mango is rarely done well. In this case, though, the melon isn't too overwhelming and the mango isn't terrible. It's probably the least of the four flavors, but it's rare when the worst flavor in a tropical bag is still decent.

Candy flavors of pineapple tend not to do the actual fruit justice. That doesn't really change here, but on the other hand it does a pretty good job of tasting like the actual pineapple Life Saver. So it's plenty edible.

Strawberry kiwi frequently just means "strawberry." Not that that's a terrible thing. In this flavor, there actually is a hint of tartness, perhaps the presence of the kiwi. That makes it slightly better, but a standard strawberry candy would already be pretty good.

Finally, there's fruit punch, which is almost always the best flavor in any mixture. The cover of the bag has raspberry and orange on it, and that tastes about right. And who can complain about that? Certainly not me.

Overall it's a decent mix. It's not really crazy tropical, but it gets there, and candy so rarely does a good job of tasting like tropical fruits that I'm not going to complain if the replacement flavors are done well. Thumbs up from me.