Candy Review: Dare Realfruit Fruit and Yogourt Gummies

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - by Laurie

As a very early riser, I do most of my writing, candy reviewing included, at the crack of dawn. While I’m not averse to a little candy first thing in the morning, it’s sometimes a nice change to be reviewing a candy that actually tastes like breakfast.

These Fruits & Yogourt gummies are a new addition to Dare’s popular Realfruit Gummies brand – gummies with natural fruit flavors and colors. We’ve previously reviewed them in fruit-snack form as part of our Back-to-School Fruit-Snack Roundup. As far as candy goes, they’re about as guilt-free of a choice as you can get – and pretty darn tasty too, since they actually contain juice and puree from the fruits they’re flavored like, not just a lot of nutrition-light “filler” juices like apple and pear.

So the originals are pretty tasty, but I’m usually wary of candies with “yogurt” in their name. Usually, it’s nothing more than an attempt to make a product look healthier than something coated in chocolate, when said “yogurt coating” is actually just an unholy amalgamation of hydrogenated oil and yogurt flavor – so it’s not only nutritionally equivalent to chocolate, it’s nutritionally equivalent to very BAD chocolate, without even the scant health benefits of the real thing.

That’s not the case here, though – the ingredients list “yogurt powder,” which is made up of modified milk ingredients and bacterial culture – nothing wrong with that, especially since they’re also fat-free. From the moment you open the bag, they really do smell like fruit-flavored yogurt.

Each gummy is divided into a fruit-colored half and a white, yogurt-colored half. (The bag is careful to tell you that the white color is also “from a natural source.”) The fruit flavor is in the colored half, while the white portion contains the tangy yogurt flavor. This bag contains three flavors: cherry, strawberry kiwi, and raspberry.

Cherry: For some reason, the cherry-flavored gummy is closer to a lemon shape. It’s not a strong cherry compared to the more commonly-used artificial flavor, but it’s definitely cherry, like watered-down cherry jam.

Raspberry: The raspberry gummy is a teardrop-shaped gummy with a stem on top. It actually looks closer to a plum than a raspberry. Without the legend on the back of the bag, I think I’d really have trouble telling which gummy was which, especially since they’re all a similar color. It actually doesn’t taste that much like raspberry, more of a generic “tangy fruit” flavor – but I guess neither does raspberry yogurt, since that’s definitely what this reminds me of.

Strawberry kiwi: This gummy breaks the mold by actually being shaped like the fruit it tastes like. It’s a much paler color than the picture on the bag, making it the lightest of the three. It’s got a very strong tangy flavor, more kiwi than strawberry, that’s mellowed by the creamy yogurt. (As an aside, I wonder how they combined kiwi with gelatin in a way that didn’t result in a puddle of goo?)

When eaten together with the white portion of the gummy, all the flavors really do taste like fruit-flavored yogurt, and with a similar list of ingredients to the real thing (sugar, gelatin, fruit ingredients, milk), I’d venture to say they’re probably even nutritionally similar. If you have to be eating candy before breakfast, you could do a lot worse.

• Dare’s Website

Buy Dare Realfruit Gummies Online:

• at Amazon.com