This is the first review in a one-off bonus series covering the items in a Snack Crate subscription box, which found its way to my parent’s mailbox. For more details on this, check out the introductory post.

Is this what I think it is? Despite having a name that reminds one of diarrhea, it looks to me like this might be the Canadian equivalent of Gushers, everyone’s favorite “liquid center” candy.

Oh man, that’s got a pretty intense scent, like the cartoon candy factory exploded, leaving a lingering cloud of artificial berry goodness lingering in the air. I’d say it’s inviting, but those against fake fruit smells will be immediately turned off; then again, what were you expecting from a candy with a liquid center?

Ewww, the candy inside is intensely sticky…I don’t know if the heat outside has something to do with it (although it’s been stored for the past two weeks inside our well air-conditioned house, and was only in a hot car for the twenty minute car ride into my work), but it seems like maybe one of the candy centers exploded all over the inside of the package, spreading its stickiness to everything else surrounding it. Yuck. I don’t mind a lot of messes, but sticky messes aren’t my favorites.

The flavors here don’t seem too far removed from American flavors, at least at first glance of the candy, which is shaped to look like the fruit it’s “based” off of: there’s cherry, grape, peach, and strawberry, which would be a pretty standard fruit line-up even down here in the states. However, a quick glance at the packaging reveals that all is not what it seems to be: the inner “juice” is its own separate flavor, instead of just a “juicier” version of the candy it’s in. So strawberry becomes “strawberry key lime”; cherry is “cherry berry”; peach is “peach raspberry”; and grape is “grape kiwi”.

It’s semi-interesting, I guess, at least on paper; the execution is rather lackluster. For starters—and again, it might have something to do with the sticky mess covering the entire inside of the package—but the juicy centers vary pretty wildly with each piece: some had a nice amount of “squirt” inside, while some didn’t seem to have anything inside them at all. But even the ones that did seem manufactured to Maynard’s ideal expectations weren’t all that memorable: in most cases, the inner feeling just takes a sweet candy flavor, and adds even more sweetness to it, which isn’t really all that interesting.

There was one combo that I don’t even recall (it might have been the grape-kiwi) that did have an interesting, kind of “contradictory” mix of flavors, but hell, with this package it might have been the sticky filling from another candy that spilled all over another one…really, it’s kind of hard to judge the candy based on such a messy package. But it’s all I have to go off of, so it is what it is, I guess.

Overall: 5.5/10. I like “Gushers”-type candy and this one delivers a combination of four different flavors, with four different juicy centers. The candy itself looks pretty straightforward, and even the combination of flavors would all seem right at home here in America, making it all too…familiar. It’s not a bad candy, but it’s also nothing great; it’s something that would just blend in with everything else in a candy shop, and nothing at all worth going out of your way for. I’d be fine to never get these again, which works out well because I probably never will.