Quench Gum is made by Mueller Sports Medicine Inc. (an even less appetizing-sounding association than regular sugarfree gum’s relationship with dentists). According to Quench’s website, Quench has been around for over 30 years, and this “sports gum” is chewed by athletes from teams like the Cowboys, the Lakers and the Packers.

We’ve previously reviewed the regular version of Quench, but it’s also available in sugarfree – after all, who wants to down a bunch of sugar right after a heavy workout? (Well yeah, me too, but it’s just so counterproductive, OK?) Both versions of Quench claim that they can actually quench your thirst and refresh you after a hard workout.

Gum can stop you from being thirsty? And here I’d been drinking water all these years like a chump! This could be the greatest breakthrough in candy technology since Willy Wonka’s meal replacement gum – and even that was a little iffy in the dessert area, or so I’ve been given to understand.

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It’s now three months since the All-Candy Expo, and I’m still getting reviews out of my dwindling candy stash. (It helps that I’m the kind of person who saves candy rather than scarfing it all down as fast as possible.) But the further I get from the expo, the more further removed I get from the context of these items, most just grabbed on a whim from a sample table and given no more thought.

Take these chocolate-covered blueberries and cranberries from Wolfgang Chocolates, for example. Anonymously wrapped in pink and blue foil pouches that totally disguised the contents, they could have been anything from Raisinet-style pieces to chunky clusters.

(It turns out that Wolfgang Candy has nothing to do with Wolfgang Puck, the first Wolfgang who comes to mind – the company was founded by the Wolfgang family from York County, Pennsylvania, who have been making candy since the early 20th century.)

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Back when I was doing the Great Chocolate Experiments, I tried a few unusual combinations of chocolate and fruits like sun-dried tomato and dried mango. But chocolate and kiwi is a new one on me, so I was intrigued when I received this Whittaker’s Kiwi Fruit chocolate bar from a friend (the same friend who was my Research Assistant for the Great Chocolate Experiments, if anyone’s keeping score). My friend’s brother left her with a few too many edible souvenirs from his trip to New Zealand, so I was happy to take this one off her hands – for the good of this website, of course.

Described on the package as “A New Zealand Favourite,” this paperback-sized block of milk chocolate (a whole 250 grams, or around half a pound) is divided into tiny bite-sized squares. Break one off, and you’ll find it’s studded with little green chunks. Dried kiwi? Not according to the ingredients, which contain only kiwi fruit and apple purees, making it more likely that the green bits are a jelly formed from dried fruit puree – fruit leather, in other words. (Chocolate-covered fruit leather – why didn’t I think of that?)

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Perhaps unusually for a sour-head like myself, I’ve never actually tried Nuclear Warheads. If the name is anything to go by, they should be about the sourest candy you can get in North America, but somehow I’ve just never tried them.

I guess that makes me pretty unsuited to review Warheads’ spin-off candy, Sour QBZ, described unenlighteningly on the package as “chewy fruity cubes.” Still, sour is sour, and I know what I like, so let’s get tasting!

My sample-sized bag of QBZ contained six soft, opaque cubes, each about the size of a dice and with a coating of sour sugar. They didn’t look like gummies, more like the soft pectin jelly of lunchbox fruit snacks. (They have both pectin and gelatin in the ingredients.) I received three red QBZ, and one each of pink, blue and green.

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The compressed dextrose candy has long been a staple item of childhood candy diets. Never heard of it? You probably know it better as SweeTarts, Runts, and dozens more – that hard, yet powdery, melt-in-your mouth candy with the tangy flavor and slight cooling effect.

With Pucker Pieces Gourmet Candy Tarts, Creative Concepts Inc. (best known for its Pucker Powder powdered candy dispensers) seems to be trying to do for the compressed dextrose candy what Jelly Belly did for the jelly bean: use unique flavors and creative marketing to “gourmet-ify” it, transforming it into something that will appeal to adults as well as kids. Like Jelly Bellies, Pucker Pieces are displayed in bulk dispensers, allowing for the creation of custom flavor mixes.

If you know how compressed dextrose candies are made, it seems like a total no-brainer for a company that specializes in a powdered dextrose candy like Pucker Powder to move to hard tabs: just like the name implies, a powder made from dextrose (a type of sugar) and other ingredients is pressed into molds at super-high pressure, forming it into hard, yet still powdery, candy treats. (Pills are made the same way.) It seems like it would be a very simple matter to press straight-up Pucker Powder (or something very similar) into a more portable, less messy version of Creative Concepts’ flagship product.

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