There's A Bunch Of New Candy Flavors And We Tried Them So You Don't Have To

We ate our way through North America’s largest candy and sweets expo to find out what you should actually try.

A trip to the Sweets & Snacks Expo is the closest thing we have to a real-life tour of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

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Welcome to Candy Land for adults. Every year inside Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, more than 800 candy and snack food makers — the major companies such as Mars, Hershey's, and Haribo, and on down to small-batch mom-and-pop confectioners — show off their newest creations and offer up sneak-peek samples of what's headed to a store near you in the coming months. We're talking four carpeted acres of gleaming junk-food displays.

It was here that I trick-or-treated from booth to booth, gorging on chocolate bars and gummies and even dehydrated mushrooms, testing the very limits of my digestive tract — all to assess the latest and greatest in sugar and salt and glorious empty calories.

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After stuffing myself with sweets like Augustus Gloop, nothing ever tasted so good as the salad I ate for dinner that evening.

Here are some of the delicious (if not nutritious) highlights:

1. These hard candies from Flamethrower combine fruit flavors (cherry, raspberry, watermelon) with the balanced burn of ghost peppers, meeting at the intersection of sweet and spicy.

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Flamethrower Candy made its name by pushing novelty products such as the Lil’ Nitro (the world’s hottest gummy bear), whose packaging is printed with consume-at-your-own-risk warnings. YouTube videos show people engaging in the company’s Toe of Satan Challenge, a stunt named after its lollipop made with a chile extract that’s purportedly 900 times hotter than a jalapeño; participants whimper and wheeze while attempting to keep the sucker in their mouths for five minutes.

(If you're brave, you can buy the Toe of Satan lollipop on Amazon for $7.45.)

2. In each chew of the Starburst Duos, you get two great tastes that also taste great *together*. For now, Duos come in two varieties: strawberry-watermelon and blueberry-lemonade.

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The ranking of the original four Starburst flavors will forever be a source of debate (though the 2017 release of the all-pink packs should have solved it once and for all). Instead of wading further into the rancorous issue, the candy maker went in a different direction with Starburst Duos, which were released back in February.

Get a pack of 84 from Amazon for $7.99. Or you could always just DIY it and put two flavors in your mouth at once.

3. Gummy worm stans, take heed: Trolli’s popular Sour Brite Crawlers are getting a spinoff! The chewy, neon-colored gummy you know and love is being enrobed in a thin, crisp shell for an added dose of crunch.

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Sour Brite Crunchy Crawlers were decorated with the Sweets & Snacks Expo’s most prestigious honor, Best in Show (a part of the convention’s annual Most Innovative New Product Awards, in which judges evaluate items based on taste, packaging, inventiveness, and whether they will sell). They’ll hit stores in December with flavors including cherry-lemon, orange-raspberry, and watermelon-strawberry.

4. Behold the hazelnut spread M&M! Beneath the crisp, thin shell of a traditional M&M lies a creamy, not-too-sweet kernel of filling that nicely evokes a certain unnamed hazelnut spread (you know the one) that has gained a cult following.

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This is certainly more enticing than the new brood of peanut M&M flavors (Mexican jalapeño, English toffee, and Thai coconut) that were introduced last September.

5. South Mill Champs, a large mushroom grower in Pennsylvania, launched Shrooms Snacks back in February...and the company’s offerings are already robust. Who's ready to try some pizza-flavored mushroom chips? 🤔

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The line includes mushroom chips in flavors such as mesquite barbecue and spicy jalapeño; snack bars that contain the aforementioned ’shroom chips alongside other granola-like ingredients; and mushroom jerky, which is sometimes intermingled with beef jerky in a single pouch.

6. Face Twisters Sour Candy Dough demands that you play with your food (and then eat it).

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With the glutinous texture of Laffy Taffy left in the sun, the brightly colored candy begs to be rolled out, molded into simple shapes, or braided to form flavor combinations. Each pack comes with globs of blue raspberry, green apple, lemon, and strawberry.

7. Say hello to the first new (and permanent) US Kit Kat flavor in nearly a decade: Kit Kat Duos Mint + Dark Chocolate.

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A top layer of green-tinted mint and a foundation of dark chocolate shelters the layers of thin wafer. The bar took the expo’s Most Innovative New Product Award in the Chocolate category. You’ll be able to break yourself off a piece when it premieres in December.

8. Halloween's candy corn game is finally getting an upgrade. Injected with the fruit flavors (grape-strawberry, lemon-cherry, orange-lime) and neon colors of Trolli's much-loved Sour Brite Crawlers gummy worms, this version maintains candy corn’s characteristic triangular shape and waxy texture.

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Winner of the Sweets & Snacks Expo’s Most Innovative New Product Award in the Seasonal category, Sour Brite Candy Corn will debut on store shelves several weeks before trick-or-treating commences.

You, waiting until fall 2019 to finally try some Trolli candy corn:

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