Reviews of New Food: Trolli Gummi Pops

As a child, my secret “cool kid” skill was the ability to eat the sourest candy—the kind that children only pop into their mouths when dared by the neighborhood bully—and shrug it off like it was absolutely nothing. The mean kids would encourage me to eat yet another Warhead or Tear Jerker, but I’d wolf it and stare back at their surprised faces without so much as an eye twitch. I not only tolerated the sourness well, I reveled in it. Warheads, sour gummies of any shape, entire lemons: If it had that puckering taste, I would demolish it.

No sour confection is safe when I am near. So when my friend Wyatt first introduced me to Trolli sour gummies years ago, I promptly asked him to hide the bag from me. Because for me, there was only eating Trolli sour gummies until I burned away all my taste buds, and my lips, teeth, and tongue turned toilet-cleaner blue.

Recently, I discovered the appropriately named “frozen novelties” aisle in my local Kroger. That’s where, as I paused to consider which flavor of vegan ice cream to take home, I found Trolli Gummi Pops staring back at me. They more than called to me; they screamed.

I immediately purchased a box and ripped into it the second I got home.

I tore open the wrapper, eager for that sour hit mixed with saccharine delight, and was disappointed to learn that Trolli Gummi Pops are not, in fact, sour. Not at all. Which was surprising given that every package of regular Trolli gummies promises three things: 1. Sour. 2. Brite. 3. Crawlers. (And occasionally 4. Electric.) Trolli Gummi Pops make good on number two: the grape-strawberry flavor I tried is brighter than a Peeps factory at peak Easter-season production. And Trolli Gummi Pops come fairly close with number three, crawlers: These frozen treats certainly look like original Trollis, albeit larger, girthier, and frozen-er. But the sour coating that truly coalesces the pucker-to-sweetness ratio into perfection? Nonexistent.

This soft, gummy, yet also frozen hard popsicle has the mouthfeel of chewing on a silicone kitchen utensil. The taste is your standard artificial flavor frenzy, but the texture falls somewhere between licking plastic and eating a slimy carrot—a texture that can only make you wonder how many microplastics you’ve just ingested. The box showcases an image of the Trolli popsicle jiggling, and I can confirm that once the freezer burn has nominally warmed, this stick of sick delight does wiggle back and forth, if you wave it around like a conductor in a candy confection orchestra.

Thanks to the classic Trolli gummy taste that’s engineered to make you eat an entire bag in one sitting, the popsicle was impossible for me to stop eating, even as the texture made me consistently question if I’d mistaken an eraser for food. (In fact, it didn’t wear down through lickage alone. It’s the only popsicle that I’ve ever had to chew.)

I gobbled it in less than three minutes.

But my husband, who was initially intrigued by this frozen novelty, was not nearly as tempted. He left two-thirds of his to melt in our kitchen sink. Yet melt it did not. For five. Solid. Hours. Instead, it formed a gloopy glob, making me wary of rinsing it down the sink for fear of repercussions on our fragile plumbing.

Unlike a bag of Trolli sour gummies, the remaining four Trolli Gummi Pops from the package will stay in my freezer until after the apocalypse, when, starving and desperate, we will drag them out and be grateful for the disturbing amounts of corn syrup, xanthan gum, and artificial strawberry flavoring that will no doubt keep Trolli Gummi Pops shelf-stable for millennia. But what if (it being the apocalypse) we don’t have a functioning freezer? Fortunately, we’ve already established that Trolli’s Gummi Pops will indeed hold their shape and resist the urge to melt into a puddle of artificial sweetener the way that inferior popsicles with better texture inevitably will.

Because when the end times come, I won’t just want a popsicle. I’ll want one that jiggles.