Yogurt-covered dried fruits have been around forever, and with the recent interest in probiotics, it looks like yogurt-flavored candies are making a comeback. Unfortunately, the dirty little secret is that modern science can’t yet convert pure, wholesome yogurt into a form that can be used to coat things. What you’re really getting with 99% of yogurt-flavored candies is white mockolate with a touch of yogurt powder for flavor – and no matter how many live bacteria you cram in there, there’s no getting around the fact that the stuff is more likely to kill you than make you live longer.
(Anyone else out there remember the days when people actually AVOIDED food that might contain live bacteria instead of considering it a selling feature? Crazy, weren’t we? *bites into undercooked chicken breast*)
Anyway, here’s a new product from a company known for making healthy things like grape juice – Welch’s Fruit and Yogurt Snacks. (This All Candy Expo sample is cherry, but I believe they had other flavors on offer as well.) Welch’s original fruit snacks had a steady presence in my school lunch bags in days gone by – they had a relatively high concentration of fruit and were tasty enough, if I recall correctly.
Despite the dubious nature of the yogurt portion of the product, these are pretty good, nutrition-wise. The 90-calorie pack has 10% of your daily recommended dose of calcium, 25% of vitamins A and D, and 100% of vitamin C, though it does also contain 8% of your daily allowance of saturated fat. The bag also contains “Live & Active Bacterial Cultures.†I was glad to hear that the bacteria are both live AND active, because I have no room for lazy bacteria in my large intestine – they gotta be hard-working, motivated, eager to get out there and do… um… whatever all this probiotic stuff is supposed to accomplish.
Like so many other things, these look a LOT nicer on the package than they do in real life. Rather than being neat little white balls with bits of gummy showing through, they’re kind of lumpy and misshapen, and a rather unattractive, uneven pinkish color from the gummy portion showing through the “yogurt†coating. They look like wads of chewed gum that some patient person has managed to roll into vaguely spherical shapes. The coating also seems rather dry and crumbly, in some cases flaking right off the gummy at the center.
The coating has a vague creamy white chocolate flavor over a surprisingly sour cherry center – kind of like a sour cherry Twizzler. The coating doesn’t melt in your mouth like chocolate – it has a very dry, almost flaky, doughy texture, with the coating on a few pieces crumbling away into grainy, gritty bits in your mouth. Eaten by themselves, the gummies have a weird doughy texture too, closer to cookie dough than licorice.
In fact, that’s a pretty good overall description of these – like lumps of slightly chewy, very sour cookie dough. If that’s your thing, more power to you I guess – but when it comes to healthy yet tasty snacking, I’d choose a bag of regular fruit snacks and a bowl of real yogurt any day.
Buy Welch’s Fruit Snacks Online:
- at Blair Candy
- at Candy Favorites
I tried these a couple of years ago and was really disappointed. Well, disappointed isn’t quite right, because that means that I had some expectation of them being good from the description.
Interesting that yours were also flaky and uneven. (Read the comments in my review if you’re curious why I bring it up.)
July 16th, 2009 at 12:08 pmCybele – Wow, for how butthurt that guy from Promotion In Motion got, these are still pretty much like you described ‘em. (And why would they bring inferior samples to an expo where the crowd clears out even the display packages on the last day?)
July 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pmSomeone gave these to my kids and I swear I used to eat a ton of Welchs product growing up but now they taste so icky, I keep finding that it was stale and probably should not even be made, like eating tires, though I have never tasted a car’s tire.
July 17th, 2009 at 4:42 pmThere used to be a product in the 90′s that was similar to this product. I can’t remember what it was but the commercial was a tree that would talk a shake and these yogurt covered fruit snacks fell down from it. The company also made yogurt covered raisins, the box was green. Instead of the gelatinous fruit snack, it was more of a gushers type candy. Does anyone remember this? These were much tastier than the Welch’s product.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:24 am