What’s worse: being outright bad, or just being……meh? In the context of candy, I’m genuinely not sure. At least bad candy has the benefit of going down in flames, of being truly shitty.

On the surface, this candy has everything going for it: It’s shaped like and named for pretzels, it’s licorice, and it says “salty spicy” on the bag. I’m in.

I love pretzels. I love pretzel shapes. Ever dunk one of those big “Snyders of Hanover” pretzels in milk? It’s a delight.

These look good opened up, too.

If you’re like us, you’d hope/expect that white stuff on the outside to be salt. It’s not. It’s sugar. We need….more sugar on our candy?

The headline here, as I said before is: meh. First, the consistency is….kind of a limbo in-between state of chewy and soft. Not really what I’m looking for in licorice, I need a real chew. Second, Haribo has never been great with their licorice flavor in my opinion-it’s not bad, it’s just very basic and boring, and lands a bit too much on the sweet side for my tastes: these are no exception.

Lastly and perhaps most lame….salty? Spicy? No, and no. I didn’t really detect either of those adjectives with these. It was similar to Wallaby’s licorice , which in my book, stinks.

So yeah. These kinda suck.

No disrespect to Haribo. You can’t do everything great, and despite not being the licorice experts, they do have a few varieties that slay. Check these out if you can find them, and these salt bombers are awesome too.

So no big deal. A miss for Haribo every now and again is to be expected.