I’m really digging Wonka’s new look and commercials. They take advantage of candy’s inventiveness and imaginative ways that kids (and adults) look at it.

One of their new candies is Puckerooms Sour Gummy Candy. They’re sour gummies (unlike the Sluggles, which are sweet gummies) in mushroom shapes and three different flavors.

The new Wonka’s Edible Garden are made with natural ingredients, including fruit juice and no artificial colorings or flavorings. (But of course they’re gummis and are not vegetarian since they use gelatin ... and in this case cochineal color, too.)

There are three flavors and three different shapes (though the shapes are applied to all the flavors):

Cherry - as you can see from the photo, I found a grape & cherry combo, but for the most part the cherry ones were single flavored. It’s a tart cherry with a black cherry darkness beneath but a lingering sour. It got my glands a’tinglin’.

Grape - it’s just so fun for me to have grape gummis, I have a hard time focusing on these for the review. The grape flavor is much like concord grape jam with Pixy Stix poured over it. (Come on, if you’d thought of it as a kid, you would have loved it!)

Lemon/Orange - I loved the look of these, the orange was always on the top, making the stem lemon. The flavors were a good blend of citrus zest and of course a sour punch that lasted beyond the grainy coating and permeated the soft gummi. The lemon and orange were distinct but blended well.

The sourness isn’t blisteringly strong, in fact, I found them barely more tart than the Sluggles, just more consistently tangy from start to finish.

I like the option of really potent gummis made without artificial flavors & colors, so these are real winners. I saw them at Target over the weekend for $1.59 for a 6.5 ounce bag, so it’s not like parents need to compromise here - the kids get a mainstream treat without going to a special store. (Of course that doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy them.)

UPDATE 11/2/2010: It appears that many folks shared their phallic views with Nestle and they updated both the package and the shapes of the actual candy.

The package is mostly green instead of purple. The Wonka name is minimized and the name of the candy is more focused on Sour Puckerooms Gummies where it was originally just called Puckerooms with a descriptive logline of sour gummy candy below that. I do like the typography on the word Puckerooms better on the new version.

The new shapes are such a compromise from the earlier, well defined mushrooms that they’re mere shadows of the shapes they once were. There are really only two shapes, the pointier one is now gone. There are two slightly different rounded ones with wide round caps and wide bases and then the narrower stemmed one with a wide cap. On the package they look distinctive. In real life they’re

So, there you go. Wonka is receptive to your ideas.

Related Candies

Name: Puckerooms RATING: SUPERB

SUPERB YUMMY

YUMMY TASTY

TASTY WORTH IT

WORTH IT TEMPTING

TEMPTING PLEASANT

PLEASANT BENIGN

BENIGN UNAPPEALING

UNAPPEALING APPALLING

APPALLING INEDIBLE Brand: Wonka (Nestle) Place Purchased: samples from All Candy Expo Price: $1.59 retail Size: 6.5 ounces Calories per ounce: 92 Categories: Gummi, Sour, Czech Republic, Nestle, All Natural