Disclaimer: I don’t really chew gum. I’m not really sure why – I enjoy the flavor (while it lasts) and the chewing action, and it’s nice to have something in my mouth to fiddle with while I do other things. When I do chew gum, I’m partial to the old-school bubblegum-style – big, soft pieces that yield face-sized bubbles and pack more sugar than some small chocolate bars. Unfortunately for me, though, it’s the skinny sticks or Chiclet-style pieces of sugar-free gum, usually heavily mentholated and bearing promises of tooth-cleaning action, that are most popular these days.

All that being said, Trident Splash Orange Swirl is definitely not a product I would have bought for myself, but nonetheless, I decided to try and approach this All Candy Expo freebie with an open mind.

Like most Chiclet-type gums, this comes in a foil-backed blister pack. Unlike most Chiclet-style gums, it also comes with the gimmick of a liquid center – something I remember seeing pretty often back in the day, but always in products aimed at kids rather than adults. Inside the blister pack, the little tabs seem thicker than usual – probably due to the extra “burst of sweet indulgence,” as the package calls it.

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Altoids – the name frightens me. I immediately get an image of my head bursting into flames as a small white tablet of destruction sears the inside of my mouth and then wreaks its havoc on the rest of my body. My husband and my mother love Altoids. They laugh at me because I am afraid of them don’t care for them.

Of course I’m talking about the dreaded peppermint Altoids. Whoever created those things must have been a sadistic former Gulag prison guard. Imagine my inconsolable weeping hesitation when I received two packages of Altoids in the mail to review.

Fortunately, they were not of the peppermint variety. Instead I’ve been able to sample the wintergreen and cinnamon flavors from the new Altoids Smalls Sugar Free line.

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I have many a fond memory of Baskin-Robbins from childhood: the free birthday cones, the baseball helmet sundaes, the hard, hard scoops that could be shot clear off your sugar cone and onto the lawn with one overzealous lick. Not to mention the choices – oh, the choices! All 31-plus of them! And I reveled in my flavor selection: Rocky Road, Rainbow Sherbet, Cookies ‘N Cream… the world was my hot fudge-covered oyster (notably not one of the aforementioned 31-plus). But I have to admit, in all my ice cream eating moments, never (ever) did I think to myself, “Mmmm, this ice cream is good, but it would be really good if only I could chew it.” So it is with a bit of skepticism that I opened up my box of Baskin-Robbins Soft Candy.

These candies come in two flavors: Mint Chocolate Chip and Very Berry Strawberry, and in both regular and sugar free varieties. They’re quite small – smaller than a Tootsie Roll – and rectangular. And they’re individually wrapped in foil reminiscent of my Viactiv Multi-Vitamin Chew (highly recommended as a vitamin supplement, less so as a sugary treat).

And soft they are. If nothing else, these things deliver in that department. Softer than both a Tootsie Roll and a Starburst chew, it took me a number of squeezes before I finally landed on Play-Doh. That’s about how soft these are, if you can imagine. (The sugar free ones actually were not quite as soft, falling somewhere between Play-Doh and Starburst on the hard/soft continuum.) But this is where the uniformity ends, so here’s how the individual flavors played out for me:

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The purist in me always tended to shy away from fruit-flavored gums, preferring the breath-freshening qualities of mint and cinnamon. But with my previously-held flavorism so completely obliterated by Orbit Citrusmint and then Stride Mandarin, I have found myself in a much more open place regarding gum selection. And it is with this spirit that I agreed to sample and review Trident’s new Passionberry Twist (with Xylitol).

Passion fruit is not one of those flavors I’m all that familiar with: kids didn’t just whip passion fruits out of their lunch boxes when I was growing up (at least not at my grade school) and, if memory serves, it’s one of those heavily seeded, hard-skinned beasts in the produce section that doesn’t exactly seduce neophytes. I have, however, sampled it on a few occasions (in the rain forests of Brazil, or Costa Rica, or Vietnam - I can’t quite remember) and in none of those places have I vomited, so I figured it must have been benign enough. Plus, I love berries, so it seemed like a winning - if mysterious - combo worthy of nothing less than a minute-by-minute review.

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If SweeTarts made a small, nondescript cherry version of its candies (in the shape of an engorged Tic Tac), they’d taste just like the Tic Tac Chill Exotic Cherry. Not bad. Not great. I like the tartness, but there’s not much “cherry” going on here. Surely nothing exotic.

The Tic Tac Chill series of sugarfree flavors (Exotic Cherry and Paradise Mint) come in a plastic box substantially larger than regular Tic Tacs - probably because the candies inside are about double the size of the standard ones. (Box note: in addition to the regular flip-top opening, the Tic Tac Chill containers have a front slide panel opening - where you see the name - that’s kind of cool and pretty straightforward to use, I thought. But Tic Tac seems to think it’s so complicated to operate that they’ve got video instructions online… go figure.)

Now, I haven’t tried the Paradise Mint, but there’s no mention of breath-freshening on the Exotic Cherry, so I consider these straight candy. Except that candy and sugarfree sound like Punch and Judy to me: they don’t tend to get along in my puppet theater.

But at least these Tic Tacs aren’t sweetened with aspartame; they have the much better-tasting xylitol. This sugar substitute also reduces dental plaque, supposedly, by attracting bad microorganisms to itself - then starving them to death because it’s not a real sugar they can use. Tell me about it.

But hey, if you want to trick your mouth and get a fairly weak cherry Sweetart-esque experience in a small package, Tic Tac Chill Exotic Cherry might be just the ticket. Don’t expect any high cherry drama, though.

The new Chill varieties of Tic Tac will be hitting shelves soon.

• Tic Tac Website