Every year, on beaches throughout the world, female green sea turtles haul themselves up out of the sea and perform the laborious task of laying their eggs and burying them in the sand. After about 60 days, the eggs will hatch and the young turtles must scramble across the dangerous beaches in an attempt to reach the sea.

These are not those turtle eggs.

Instead, Nestle Turtles Eggs are based on the pecan and caramel-filled chocolate candies popular at dinner parties everywhere. Now, caramel eggs are a dime a dozen around Easter time (almost literally if you wait for the after-Easter sales to do your candy shopping). But add one of my most favorite nuts, pecans, to the mix, and you have yourself a winning combination. Turtles are one of the few mainstream candies that contain pecans, but their relative expense means I don’t buy them that often, so I was pleased to be able to score one of these puppies at post-Easter sale prices.

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Package disclaimer: “Not recommended for pregnant women, children, or persons sensitive to caffeine.” (This includes YOU, weird pregnant guy expecting your second kid in June!)

Huh? This is just wrong: A candy bar aimed straight at the shaved heads of wacky, Jack-Ass-style twenty-somethings. In this fast-paced and hectic age, do we really need more buzz? I guess someone thinks so.

The Nestle advertising blitz and buzz (can you sense the trend here?) features online videos of highly energized male and female actors playing the part of young adults shaving one another’s heads and spray painting stencils of the Butterfinger Buzz logo onto their freshly revealed scalps. The ads seem to shout: THESE COOL YOUNG PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND YOU NEED TO HANG OUT WITH THEM RIGHT NOW!! A paintball gun is even used – that was crazy sick YO! No, just stupid. All this for a candy bar? And not a very good one? Come on.

At the very least, the campaign seems forced. Certain candy icons should never be messed with.

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Certain candies catch my eye during the holidays that I normally avoid consuming throughout the regular year. Why? Well, by the time you gulp down whatever candy you just bought, chances are it has been sitting on a shelf for quite some time. I mean, I always see gas stations stocking limited edition bars made years ago.

However, since holiday candy is seasonal, you’re more likely to purchase a product that is fresher. And with the rare exception, candy tastes better the less it ages.

So while perusing the Valentine’s Day candy aisle at Walgreens, I spotted Wonka’s SweeTARTS Hearts. Actually, it was pretty hard to miss them with the festive packaging of blue and pink swirled in a very Wonka style. If I can find fresh SweeTARTS, I usually enjoy them, so I figured there could be great potential in these. Plus, they only cost 50 cents.

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Of all the Nestle chocolate bars that aren’t available in the United States, the most popular has got to be Coffee Crisp. With legions of fans around the world, it was about time for Canada’s favorite chocolate-coated-wafer-bar-with-coffee-in-its-name-that-doesn’t-really-taste-like-coffee to get a special edition of its own. Hence, the Coffee Crisp Chocolatey Crunch Bar.

Now, for a bar that was already known for being crunchy and chocolatey, this seems like an odd concept for a special edition. At first glance, the main difference between this and the original is the shape – while the original is a thick rectangle with every side the same width, the new bar seems to have been flattened into a thinner, wider, more “traditional” chocolate-bar shape.

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The 100 Grand bar is a candy bar that I grew up with. So to me, it’s at least 100 years old. But the truth of the matter is that this confection doesn’t even qualify as a Retro Candy Flashback because it debuted in 1966 (I think a candy has to be at least fifty before it gets that privilege).

Having one of the more unique mechanisms for invention, the bar began its life as a byproduct of the then-popular television game show The Big Surprise. In this show, contestants answered questions in order to win a prize that totaled, you guessed correctly, 100 grand. It’s akin to someone issuing a millionaire bar to play off the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? craze a few years back.

The candy originally billed itself as the $100,000 Bar, but the brand we think of today developed in the eighties due to the popular term for that denomination of currency.

In tune with most Nestle products, this one is pretty simple in terms of its ingredients: milk chocolate, caramel, and crisped rice. One unique difference between it and a good portion of Nestle’s confectionery lineup is that this candy still uses real chocolate.

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