Candy Review: Yogen Früz Smoothies

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - by Laurie

When it comes to candy packaging, I am a shallow, shallow person – particularly around mint-type candies. If it comes in an awesome tin, I am all over it, to the point where I have a pretty impressive collection of mint tins accumulating in my desk drawer at work. I am never in my entire life going to have enough tiny widgets and gewgaws to fill all those tins – and yet, again and again I find myself buying candy of questionable quality because it came in awesome and potentially reusable packaging.

Like the other day, when I was skimming the shelves at London Drugs looking for discounted Easter candy… and something else caught my eye: a rack of Yogen Früz Smoothies tins. The clean, modern design of the tin, its colors just evoking the blue and pink of the Yogen Früz logo… its use of the ü, which doubles as a happy face, as a design element… its paltry price of $1.79. Half-price chocolate bunnies aside, I knew I had to have one… quite possibly in every flavor they came in. I managed to settle for just Strawberry Banana.

Once I got home, the doubts started to set in. I enjoy a good frozen yogurt, but yogurt-flavored hard candy? It’s not like there isn’t decent yogurt-flavored candy in the world, but in my experience, all of it is soft. This product appears to be YF’s attempt to join Baskin Robbins and Cold Stone Creamery in the frozen-treats-with-spin-off-candies department. (Can I call them YF? Those umlauts are a bear to insert.) But while those other candies mimic the decadence of a full-fat ice cream cone, YF is going for the same market as its healthy, yet indulgent frozen treats with fruit and yogurt flavors, and even a healthy-sounding title of “Smoothies.”

The clean, spare packaging, while attractive, does somewhat resemble a diet product rather than a candy, and the tin is even sprinkled with buzz words like “all-natural” and “probiotic.” (Those bacteria are some hardy little guys if they can survive in the dry, acidic environment inside a SweeTART-like candy.) And with no fat and only three calories a candy, these were starting to look less and less like they were aimed at the day-after-Easter-candy crowd, and more and more like they were aimed at the yoga-antioxidant-goji-berry crowd. But hey, if they actually tasted good, they’d be as close to a guilt-free candy as you can get.

(I should probably mention that these are made in Canada, and so are possibly Canada-only – it’s not always easy to tell.)

The candies do indeed resemble SweeTARTS – they’re little round compressed-dextrose discs, in this case a very pale pinky-purple, embedded with the signature “ü.” Texture-wise, they’re not actually very much like SweeTARTS or other mints I’ve had – the texture is a lot softer, almost crumbly, quickly disintegrating into little gritty bits with a texture I’m really not crazy about.

Flavor-wise, they’ve definitely got a yogurty tang to them. They’re pretty sour, but not really in the good way. The strawberry banana flavor actually kind of unpleasant – it’s got that same so-sweet-it’s-sour aftertaste as some artificially sweetened things do, even though there’s only real sugar in them. Combined with the sour taste of the yogurt, it brings to mind underripe strawberries and that bitter white stuff inside a banana peel rather than the sweet, mellow interior.

In all, they don’t remind me of candy so much as they do some fruit-flavored chewable multivitamins I had as a kid – it’s like the fruit flavor’s only there to cover up the bad taste of the stuff that’s good for you, but the fruit taste only combines with the medicine taste for a new level of badness.

So I got my cute tin this time – but a whole lot of not-so-good candy to go along with it. Did I learn my lesson? Definitely… at least until the next shiny new thing comes along.

• Yogen Früz Website