A Festival (or Failure) of Fall Flavors
By Patrick Davison
After a recent controversial article about my disdain for fall beverages and snacks, we decided to test as a team and see if I was justified in my views (or if I may have been overreacting).
Fall enjoyers and autumn despisers, I welcome you to my (and the rest of The Herald team’s) review of Trader Joe’s pumpkin spice snacks. As some of you are already aware, I’m not a big fan of pumpkin spice and spoiler alert — these snacks have not changed my opinion. If you haven’t heard my views or just need a refresher, you can read about them here. You can see the other side of the discussion from my colleague Derek Lionberger here.
We ate five snacks and had a single beverage. The worst one was a two-way tie between the beverage — which we will get to — and the pumpkin spice cookies. The cookies were a major let down for most of us, with the vast majority of us calling them bland, tasteless, and even a major disappointment. Jared Smith (’24) took it a step further, calling it a “pumpkin flavor circus cookie.” I have to agree with that assessment for sure. The team gave it an overall 4.3 out of 10. Matching this score was the “spiced cider,” an apple cider seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, allspice, orange, and lemon zest. This, in my completely honest opinion, was a blemish on the mostly untarnished reputation of apple cider. It was a major failure, missing the best parts of both flavors. In pumpkin spice seasoned snacks, pumpkin works as a grounding flavor that is mellow compared to the sharper cinnamon and allspice. And in apple cider, there is a natural sweetness of the cider and the inherent crisp-ness that comes with fall. The cider we drank had the issue of conflicting focuses. It’s like going through a textbook and trying to highlight everything that you find important, but you end up highlighting the entire page — if everything is important, nothing is.
Only slightly better were the maple cookies, coming in at an astounding 4.6 with Editor-in-Chief Chloe Cochran (’23) said only one thing, “no bueno.” I am quite inclined to agree with her assessment of these maple cookies! As a Vermont boy myself, I’m no stranger to maple syrup flavored snacks. But, to be honest, this one really overdid the maple. It tasted like you were drinking straight from the bottle of Aunt Jemima’s. It had that fake, sugary, high fructose corn syrup flavor to it and was just a failure on all accounts, but at least we were getting somewhere with an actual flavor!
Next, we had the Pumpkin Walks Into a Bar which was just a pumpkin bar, go figure. This one was pretty good, and my favorite out of all the snacks(although my colleagues seemed to disagree)! I rated the bars an 8/10. However, Makinna Winterton (‘24), rated them a 1/10, saying that they were “dry, disgusting, will not eat again.” Well, have it your way Makinna, more of these for me. Overall, we gave these a 6.1 out of 10, which is not too bad!
With that, we are two thirds of the way through, and the last two snacks were a bit unusual as far as fall foods go. Next up were the pumpkin flavored Joe-Joes, which were, for the uninitiated, like the donut holes they sell at Dunkin’ Donuts. The overwhelming majority of the team here at The Herald agreed that these were pretty alright, giving them an average rating of 6.2 out of 10, with Carter Nielsen (’22) giving it a 9, saying it had the “perfect frosting amount.”
Finally, our winner for the Trader Joe’s snack-off, an underdog for sure, and one that was more than welcome as a change to the autumn formula — pumpkin tortilla chips and pepita salsa. It was a complete change of pace from the other goodies we tasted, and ultimately what it came down to was not the pumpkin chips, but the salsa! It was refreshing and savory, and honestly not particularly fall themed. If the salsa had been any worse, the chips would have been pretty close to irredeemable. They were slightly below average tortilla chips that happened to be tinted orange. They tasted nothing like pumpkins! However, the salsa was, to quote Professor Jared Covington, “soooooo good.” Ultimately, I have to agree with him. The salsa had a nice kick to it and it really salvaged the whole taste test, rounding us out with a final score of 7.555–an above average snack compared to the rest.
So dear reader, was the Trader Joe’s haul worth it? Well, I don’t know. I didn’t buy it, and to be quite frank I don’t think I would buy any of these (except maybe the pumpkin bars, those were pretty alright). Even if you think I am a bit biased based on my recent article, I have to admit, even after these taste tests, I think fall snacks fall short. I guess we will have to wait and test the next holiday snacks and see if they fa-la-la-la-fail like these did.
