Sweethearts Candy *Review*

We all are familiar with conversation hearts at Valentine’s Day. I wish these things were sold year round. I love them! One brand is Sweethearts.

Sweethearts have completely changed. For the first time in 145 years, there are new colors, new flavors, new packaging and new sayings generated by the American public. Sweethearts have never solicited feedback from consumers for the creation of the sayings, but the top two sayings provide insight in how people communicate love in this digital era. The top two sayings were “Tweet Me” and “Text Me.” Sweethearts also launched an app for Twitter users to send personalized, virtual boxes of Sweethearts (check it out here: www.mysweethearts.com).

For the first time ever, the 2010 Sweethearts candy sayings have been chosen by America and demonstrate our “love” of social media. The top new sayings are “Tweet Me” and “Text Me.” Sweethearts, a 145-year-old way of sharing short and sweet messages is partnering with the newest way to share short messages – Twitter.

Sweethearts launched an app that Twitter will be helping to promote as a way to bring this classic candy brand into 2010. Twitter will be writing featuring it in its definition box for the week. The definition box is the top right side of every user’s profile and will click through to a site where we will be hosting an application (more on that below).

Sweethearts created an iPhone app that allows people to send a virtual Sweethearts box to loved ones with personalized messages on hearts. The app features an option that allows these phrases to appear in a person’s Twitter timeline. Currently, most brands are creating apps that integrate with Facebook status updates so this will be among the first brand apps to integrate with Twitter. The app will also be housed on a dedicated URL for Twitter users who aren’t on iPhones.

This past spring, Sweethearts ran a contest to let Americans choose the phrases on the hearts. They’ve never done this in the 145-year history of the brand. Previous sayings released annually centered on a theme the company created. Some recent examples include last year’s food-related phrases under a “Menu of Love” theme: “Spice It Up” “Honey Bun” “Sugar Pie” “My Treat” “Recipe 4 Love” “Table For Two” “Stir My Heart.” Other prior years were weather- and pet-related. The last big technology phrases that got a lot of buzz were “Fax Me” and “Email Me” about a decade ago.

In addition to these all new phrases, the candies themselves will look and taste completely different this year – brighter colors, fruitier flavors and more.

My thoughts: I love that there are new sayings added to the Sweethearts: “Text me” & “Tweet me”. It is neat to see companies keeping up with the current trends and listening to the public’s thoughts and ideas. I am going to be honest here and say that I really loved the ‘old school’ taste of Sweethearts. We didn’t like the blue or the pink flavors. The new flavors are:

• Pink: Strawberry (This tasted more like cotton candy with a wicked aftertaste that made me look for a glass of water)
• Purple: Grape (We never got a purple one. Opened 4 boxes and not one purple, so we don’t know what it tasted like)
• Green: Green Apple (Tastes just like green apple candy)
• Yellow: Lemon (Tart lemon flavor, but not too tart)
• Orange: Orange (This one was my favorite out of all of them)
• Blue Raspberry (This tasted like a combination between a Blue Raspberry Dum-Dum sucker dipped in sour salt; truly not a good addition.)

I do have to say that I was saddened to see that more than half of the Sweethearts, per box, were blank. Some were completely blank, but some you could tell where the imprint missed the candy all together. It appeared as if the stamp machine was about ¼ inch off from where it needed to be.

I got one “Tweet me” in 4 boxes and not one “Text me”, from the new sayings. I would love to see the stamping improved on Sweethearts to get them back to how they were when I was a kid. They were perfect hearts, perfect sayings, hardly any broken ones and the stamping was right on. It seemed to me that these were harder to eat, harder in consistincey. With another brand that I compared these to, the other brand was a lot easier to eat; didn’t leave my teeth in pain afterwards & the imprint was clearer.

For more information, please visit http://www.necco.com/ 

All opinions in this posting are 100% my own.

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