My wife is a child. No, literally. Well, not “literally” in the sense that I’m a pedophile (she is 27 years old), but “literally” in that she has many of the same interests that children do: she purchases kiddie pools for herself to lay in, alone, over summer; she enjoys coloring in kid’s coloring books to pass time; and she will often try to talk me into buying her candy at checkout counters, much in the way a child would. In other words, she’s essentially a kid in grown-up form. I mention this not as an interesting psychological study, or out of spite, or to place our relationship under a microscope, and I’m also willfully excusing myself from such a spotlight (I could mention the child’s basketball hoop I traveled 30 miles to purchase for $5, just so I could shoot hoops in our living room—and this was just five years ago), because all that is beside the point. The only reason I’m bringing this up at all is just a long, extended, roundabout way of saying that the moment I saw gumballs featured in Aldi’s Special Buy ad, I thought of one person, and one person only.

All it took was me pointing these out at the store during a shopping trip for her to pounce on them, although I would be lying if I didn’t admit that part of me was actually looking forward to trying these out, too. I remember having a small, cheap (well, kind of…it was made of glass and metal) gumball machine when I was a kid—the kinds where you insert a penny and get one small piece of circular gum—and I used to love refilling the machine and chomping on them every once in a while. With both of us a little too anxious to relive our respective childhood’s vicariously through a plastic container of gum, it only took us a day before we dug in.

The main thing I’ve always remembered about gumballs is how quickly the flavor disappears—that was a complaint I had as a child, and it’s still a valid complaint today. I kind of understand this problem twenty years ago—after all, I don’t think even the “legit”, packaged gum had flavors that lasted very long—but in this day and age, it seems like we should be able to get a fruity flavor to last longer than five minutes. It probably has more to do with the business aspect (companies don’t care how long a flavor lasts once they have your quarter), but I was hoping the flavor in these gumballs would last a while.

They don’t at all, with each flavor totally vanishing within the ten-minute mark (this might be generous, as it felt closer to five). The downside to this is obvious, because just as you’re getting settled in, the flavor is gone; the upside, is that I was able to test drive every flavor within twenty minutes, without spitting them out too early and wasting them. There are five colors, with each one having a different flavor, as you would expect: orange, white, red, pink, and yellow.

*Orange is, as you would expect, flavored like an orange. I’m not usually a fan fake orange candy, but it was more accurate than I was expecting, and had a very strong flavor that burst out immediately upon biting into it. It was the first kind that I tried, and definitely one of my favorites.

*We were expecting white to be either coconut, or pineapple (which sounds weird, but I’m pretty sure in machine gumballs, this is the case), but oddly, it was neither. In fact, as far as we can tell with this one, Crazy Candy Co. just completely threw out the whole fruit theme altogether: it tastes just like vanilla frosting, with maybe a hint of amaretto. No joke. There’s not even a fruit that’s anywhere near this taste spectrum. I thought this one was terrible; my wife really liked it.

*The red I thought was cherry, and it still might be, but the flavor isn’t as in-your-face as I was expecting: it’s like a slow-burn build-up to a vaguely sweet fruity flavor that may or may not be cherry. At this point, I’m losing my mind, because what I thought would be a straightforward trip down memory lane is actually becoming a confusing confrontation with everything I held dear in my childhood. Why would Aldi confuse us like this?

*The yellow, which I didn’t even realize existed until two days later, is another classic fruit flavor: lemon. And like the orange, it explodes right off the bat with an authentic taste that’s very welcome after a couple of near-duds. Up there with orange as my favorite of the five-flavor bunch.

*The pink looks like it would be a straightforward bubblegum flavor, and thankfully, it is. No weird surprises, just the typical taste that you’ve probably experienced many times as a child. This was one of the last flavors I tried, and so it helped to end things on a good, and familiar, note.

I’d say at just $1.69 per container, this collection of gumballs is worth the price, but with the caveat that a couple of the flavors are not at all what we were expecting. I wouldn’t say that any of the flavors are terrible—I was able to chew all of them until the flavor ran out on its own—it’s just that a couple of the taste inclusions are quite baffling. And with no flavor list to reference them by on the packaging, no questions will be answered, at least in the foreseeable future.

Overall: 6.5/10. $1.69 is a good price point for this large container of gumballs (it looks smaller than it is; there are quite a bit of gumballs inside), but the biggest drawback is the lack of flavor information anywhere on the packaging. The orange (orange), pink (gumball), and yellow (lemon) flavors are pretty obvious, but the white (which tastes like vanilla frosting with a dash of amaretto), and red (possibly cherry, but a very weird, inaccurate one) leave more questions than answers. As is always the case with this kind of gum, the flavor disappears around the five-minute mark, so don’t expect to get much chew-time out of each serving. There are much better deals in the gum world, but if you just want a reminder of simpler times, when you spent a quarter to get hard gumballs that had been sitting in the machine for a year, then this serves as a pretty accurate throwback.