February 2022

Jelly Belly "Krispy Kreme Doughnuts"

Jelly Belly

Jelly Belly is a company that tries and often succeeds at getting jelly beans to taste like things jelly beans shouldn’t taste like. What I’m trying to say is that Jelly Belly is able to turn things you didn’t think were flavours, into jelly beans. These are the perfect example of just that. It would be very easy to take a jelly bean and fill it with the flavours that you find in a doughnut. For example, you could make a chocolate jelly bean and claim it’s a chocolate doughnut and use the packaging to sell the idea that this normal chocolate jelly bean is actually chocolate doughnut flavoured. Jelly Belly doesn’t do that, each and every one of these jelly beans has a strange doughnut flavour to them, as well as the flavours of the variety of doughnut it’s supposed to represent (sort of).

While my brain doesn’t really know what to do with a jelly bean that tastes like a doughnut, objectively I feel like Jelly Belly did a good job. There are however a few problems I find with the secondary flavours of these Jelly Bellies. The Chocolate Ice With Sprinkles and Strawberry Iced did pretty well. I had no problem telling them apart, and once I bit into them I was satisfied that they tasted like their appropriate doughnut. After the first two flavours things started to get a little muddled. I could kind of tell the difference visually from the Cinnamon Filled Apple and the Glazed Blueberry Cake, but flavour wise it was pretty hard to tell the difference. Sadder still was the Original Glazed which in its doughnut form sits in high esteem with me, fell very flat in Jelly Belly form. I would go so far as to say that the Original Glazed would be disappointing to get on their own, unlike their doughnut cousin.

I feel like two out of 5 of these doughnuts did well. Two of these doughnuts might have done better if they just boosted the flavours a bit. The last flavour was just disappointing, and double disappointing since it’s my favourite Krispy Kreme doughnut. While I was really happy to taste a jelly bean that tasted like a doughnut, even though my brain couldn’t exactly figure out what was going on, I don’t know if these will become classic Jelly Belly flavours or just flash in the pan gimmicks.