Not All Chocolate Candies Are Alike

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I found both of these Sunspire Drops, Original and Peanut variety, on the clearance rack of our local Kroger and since they looked like other candy covered chocolate treats I thought I’d give them a try. They came in two flavors: Original and Peanut both with four colors of candy covering in yellow, red, orange and brown.  At the clearance price of 79¢ these are more expensive than other mainstream candies of the same type.

The peanut pieces are full sized peanuts which as you can see means they vary in size greatly.  The principal flavor is dye here and that really surprised me followed by the unsalted peanut itself.  Chocolate?  If I didn’t know these were supposed to have chocolate I couldn’t tell from the underneath the overly sweet cane juice which is the second ingredient on the list for the center and the first ingredient for the candy covering.  At 190 calories in a little pack it just isn’t worth it.

           

The original flavor was more chocolate but it tasted stale.  That might be a result of how long Kroger kept it around though there was no evidence of either fat or sugar bloom so temp and moisture wasn’t the issue.  Chocolate can go stale but it usually takes a year or so for that to start and I’ve never honestly tasted chocolate this stale.  If the produce is this sensitive it needs an expiration date on it.   As with the peanut variety at 180 calories for this pack the flavor just is not worth your mouth or money.

The purpose of Sunspire is to help cocoa producing communities which means that they support fair trade practices and deal directly with producers not middle men.  That’s a good goal but when the product you produce cannot stand toe to toe with the big mass producers, it doesn’t do you much good.  They will have to improve this product to be truly worthy competitors at this price.  Granted these were on clearance but still the product should be good for a while even past the "best by" date which the mass produced similar products are.