M&M's Pumpkin Spice

Kudos to M&M's for all of their new limited time flavors that they're testing.  In addition to past years' White Chocolate Candy Corn, we have this Pumpkin Spice to add to this autumn's repertoire, and I even just picked up a new edition for this coming Christmas season!

I'm not really sure what they were thinking when they made these.  Chocolate is such an overwhelming flavor that I feared it would drown any "pumpkin spice", and I was mostly right.  Whether these actually have any pumpkin flavor in them, it's undetectable.  If you try hard, you end up detecting some hints of pumpkin pie spice flavors: mostly allspice, with maybe a bit of nutmeg and cinnamon.  It's pleasant, but barely there, and these candies end up tasting almost identical to the original.

In all fairness, allspice is such a seldom-used ingredient in American cuisine that when an average American tastes it, they might think of pumpkin.

M&M's probably doesn't want to overuse their white chocolate variety as a base for other flavors, but milk chocolate really doesn't sing well with much else.  One thing they did get right: these candies are slightly larger, like most of the ephemeral M&M's varieties.  The larger size increases the amount of chocolate in each candy, thereby decreasing the proportion of candy shell, and it makes it better.  Click here for more discussion of how changing proportions can make a snack even better than the original.


M&M's Pumpkin Spice:- Good

Original M&M's(for comparison):- Good