Ah, Skittles. Remember that good old-fashioned rainbow of fruit flavors? Remember when it just came in that friendly red package, and you could eat a full three-quarters of the bag before you started to feel ill?
Those were good times, weren’t they?
Not good enough for Mars Incorporated, apparently, because awhile back, the company started rolling out new Skittles varieties all willy-nilly. I believe the tropical flavors came first, followed by Wild Berry, Smoothie Mix, the so-disgusting-they’re-awesome Sour Skittles, and — if the candy’s Wikipedia page is to be believed — all kinds of strange and terrible spinoffs, like Skittles Mints, Liquorice Skittles, and, dear God, Double Sour Skittles.
You’d think they were all done, right? No more fruit frontiers to explore? Every pot of gold at the end of every rainbow plundered? You’d think that, all right, but you aren’t an evil genius in the employ of a dark and powerful candy empire. Behold, bitches! Chocolate Mix Skittles have arrived!
Looking at this bag, two immediate reactions seem appropriate:
1. What, is chocolate a fucking fruit now?
2. (As spoken by my wife when I came home with these) Chocolate Skittles? Aren’t those M&M’s?
Not to spoil anything for you, but the answers to both questions are a loud and hearty “no.”
So here’s the deal with Skittles’ Chocolate Mix. Each bag gives you five flavors: S’mores, Chocolate Caramel, Chocolate Pudding, Brownie Batter, and — inexplicably — Vanilla. There are problems with this, and they aren’t the ones you might think. Observe the following:
The picture doesn’t totally do the bag’s contents justice, but as you might have noticed, it’s roughly 85% Brownie Batter. Also, what you totally can’t see in the picture is that Skittles Chocolate Mix is gross.
Now, this isn’t exactly objective reporting, because I probably haven’t had a single Skittle in almost 10 years. No matter how few I eat, I always come away from the bag feeling like it was too many. Aside from a brief fascination with the aforementioned Sour Skittles (it ended badly), my intestines have been a Skittles-free zone for a very long time. But before you go saying this post has a liberal anti-Skittles bias and demanding a new writer, let me share an important piece of information with you, which is: Skittles Chocolate Mix share neither taste nor consistency with regular Skittles. They’re like a totally new, totally terrible candy.
The first problem with Chocolate Mix Skittles is one of consistency. Chewing on one of these things is like munching on naugahyde or stale beef jerky — they make Necco Wafers seem like marshmallows. Not cool. Oh, and here’s the worst part: All that work pays off with a flavor that can best be described as revoltingly sweet. I mean, chocolate is pretty much an afterthought as far as Chocolate Mix Skittles are concerned — it’s sugar first, ask questions later — or better yet, more sugar later. I’m pretty sure all the chocolate is contained in the hard candy shell, and the innards are pure cane sugar. I would have tried to take a cross-section shot, but I didn’t dare bite these with anything that wasn’t a molar, and I was afraid that taking a knife to one would have ended in a broken window.
The bottom line: Eat these at your own peril. You can eat mine, actually — I’ve still got most of my bag sitting right here. If nobody wants it, I’ll just pour the contents into an old sock and use it as a weapon in case anyone ever breaks into my house.
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