Candy Review: Ant Bully Sweet Rocks
Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - by Brian

Categories: Candy, Candy Reviews, New Candy, Novelty Candy, Soft Candy

I couldn’t resist a pack of Jelly Belly Ant Bully Sweet Rocks when I saw them in the store. We had so much fun with the Bertie Bott’s jellybeans that I was hoping for the same kind of fun with the Sweet Rocks.

The Sweet Rocks pack contains 16 different flavors of “normal” Jelly Belly jellybeans and I won’t bother reviewing those. The stars of the show are the new flavors made just for this pack: Alka Root, Ant Hill, Caterpillar, and Lawn Clippings. Those are the ones we’ll focus on.

Alka Root: I really had no idea what to expect with Alka Root so whatever it tasted like would be a surprise. Turns out it tastes a lot like root beer, and has a slight licorice taste. It’s actually pretty good - I like it!
Caterpillar: I fully expected this one to be a spitter-outter, but it was actually very fruity, like fruit punch with a hint of cotton candy. It’s pretty good -a little too sweet for me, but quite tasty overall. It’s very different from eating a real caterpillar, I would imagine.
Lawn Clippings: This one has a very subtle flavor - it just barely tastes like grass. Not enough to say it tastes bad at all though. Not great, but not bad.
Ant Hill: This is the only one that I would classify as tasting bad. Not bad enough to spit out, but bad. It’s really a hard-to-describe taste. It’s a little spicy, a little soapy, a little chocolatey. I would describe it as spicy, chocolate soap. Not good.

I had two problems with the Ant Bully Sweet Rocks mix:

The chocolate pudding flavor looks too similar to Ant Hill. None of the other new flavors were easily mistaken for other flavors and I actually ate a chocolate pudding thinking it was Ant Hill. I even wrote a review of it saying it was chocolatey and pretty good then I tried the one I thought was chocolate pudding and got Ant Hill. Why not swap out chocolate pudding with some other flavor that doesn’t look like a new flavor?
I only had 2 Alka Root, 1 Ant Hill, 1 Lawn Clipping, and 2 Caterpillar jellybeans. I had to split some beans in half so my daughter and I could both try them and that’s no fun. I know it’s a random mixture (and in the Bertie Bott’s review I didn’t even get one of all the gross flavors), but is making sure there are at least three of each new flavor in the box such a big deal? We bought the box for the new flavors after all.