What Working at a Candy Company Taught Me About Trying New Things
I didn't think I liked green apple candy. Actually, that's putting it mildly. For years, green apple was an automatic no for me. I've been burned before, and eventually it just sort of became part of my personality. I don't like green apple candy. I don't choose green apple candy. If there are five flavours in front of me and one of them is green apple, congratulations to the other four.
And honestly, I blame Skittles.
There was a time when Skittles made the absolutely wild decision to replace the lime green Skittle with a green apple one. Now, changing a flavour is one thing. What I took particular issue with was keeping it in the Original Skittles package as if nothing had happened.
I discovered this betrayal in a movie theatre. I'd picked up my quintessential movie snacks: popcorn, a drink and a bag of Skittles. The lights went down, I opened the bag, tossed a few Skittles into my mouth without looking and immediately tasted green apple.
Excuse me? The green one was supposed to be lime. It had ALWAYS been lime.
Not only had green apple infiltrated my bag of Original Skittles without warning, but it had also replaced one of the harder-to-find flavours. I didn't eat Skittles for a very long time after that. They've since changed the green Skittle back to lime, which I personally find both hilarious and validating, but the damage had already been done.
Green apple and I had beef.
Then I started working at a candy company.
One of the best parts of working at The Sugar Cube is that I genuinely know the candy we sell. If someone asks me for a recommendation, I need to know what I'm recommending. Is it soft? Is it chewy? Is it flocked with sugar? Is it sour without the sugar coating? Is it one flavour or a combination of a few? How sour are we talking? These are important questions!
So yes, I get to try a lot of candy. It's a pretty great job perk, especially when you have access to premium gummy candy that you probably wouldn't come across otherwise. But the more candy I've tried, the more I've realized how specific our preferences actually are.
Black licorice is another good example for me. Classic black licorice isn't my favourite. Salty black licorice is definitely not my favourite. But the black licorice flavour in a classic black jujube? I like it. Those little black licorice jawbreakers? Delicious. Apparently I don't dislike black licorice nearly as much as I dislike certain versions of black licorice.
Which brings me back to green apple.
The Green Apple Bites
We carry Sour Green Apple Bites at The Sugar Cube, and for the first TWO YEARS I worked here, I didn't try one.
I handled them all the time. I photographed them because they're this fantastic, almost neon green, and they look great in photos. I saw them constantly in the warehouse. They're even a great candy to use when we're building things because they're smaller and fall into all the little crevices between bigger gummies, so you can really pack them in there.
I was extremely familiar with this candy. I just wouldn't eat it. It said green apple on the bag. I had all the information I needed.
Then one day, I finally tried one. Turns out, I did not have all the information I needed.
It wasn't the intense, artificial green apple flavour I had associated with green apple candy for years. To me, it tastes like biting into a crisp Granny Smith apple with just a little bit of pear mixed in. Two flavours I already love. It's tart and fresh and completely different from what I'd decided "green apple candy" was supposed to taste like.
I loved it.
After two years of this candy sitting right in front of me, I realized I'd been missing out because I'd written off an entire flavour based on the versions I'd tried before.
But here's the thing: I still don't really like green apple candy.
Give me a green apple gummy bear, and I'm probably still going to pass. They're incredibly flavourful. You can smell the green apple as soon as you get near them, and that's exactly what puts me off. If you LOVE green apple, though? I would absolutely recommend them to you because I know you're probably looking for exactly the thing I don't like about them.
And I think that's what I find so interesting about candy now. Sour Green Apple Bites didn't teach me that I was wrong about green apple. They taught me that my original opinion was just a little too broad.
There isn't one definitive version of green apple. You can have something incredibly intense or something much more subtle. You can mix it with other flavours. You can change the texture. You can change the balance of sweet and sour. Somewhere along that spectrum, everyone has their own threshold.
Apparently mine involves pear.
The Fun Part About Knowing Candy
The more candy I've tried, the better I've gotten at figuring out what someone else might like too. Tell me a few of your favourite flavours and textures, and I can probably give you a pretty solid list of other candies that I think will hit home for you.
We do this on the Candy Truck all the time. People come up to the window and choose three gummies for their $5 candy bag, and sometimes we'll look at what they've picked and think, okay, if you like those three, you HAVE to try this.
So we'll put one extra candy on top of their bag, a sample of something they didn't choose for themselves.
One of my favourite things is when that person comes back later and says, "Oh my God, what was that candy you put in my bag?" Then suddenly they're ordering another candy bag and asking us to include their new favourite, plus two more things we think they should try.
That's the fun of it. You don't have to abandon the things you already know you love. You just leave a little room for the wildcard.
It's also one of the reasons I love our Advent Calendars. We put 25 different candies in there, and we're not expecting every single person to love every single day. Of course you won't! Sometimes you're going to open a cube, try the candy and confidently decide that one is not for you.
But somewhere in those 25 days, you're probably going to find a couple of candies you never would have picked for yourself. Different flavours, different textures, candies from different countries, things you might not have known existed. Suddenly one of them gets added to your favourites list.
And really, that's the win.
I still have my favourite candies, and I still have flavours I'm suspicious of. I think I actually know my preferences better now than I ever have before. The difference is that I'm a little less willing to declare an entire flavour dead to me based on one version of it. Try it. Maybe you'll love it. Maybe you'll hate it. Maybe you'll discover that you like black licorice only when it's inexplicably shaped like a tiny jawbreaker. That's useful information too.
Just maybe don't let one rogue green apple Skittle make decisions for you for the rest of your life. Because every once in a while, you find your Sour Green Apple Bite.
