Ranking jelly beans to determine the perfect choice for your Easter basket
Do you go with the classic Brach’s? The iconic Starburst? Or a new contender like Skittles or … Nerds?
When we were kids, we’d wake up on Easter morning and begin scouring the house for our Easter baskets. I’m not sure how it worked in your household, but in ours, the Easter Bunny put a lot of effort into hiding the baskets belonging to my siblings and me. The goal was always to find your basket before the family had to leave for church, but as we got older, the Easter Bunny made it harder and harder to find our baskets. (It also probably didn’t help that if we found our sister’s Easter basket before she did, we’d re-hide it, making it impossible for the Easter Bunny to give her any guidance.)
For most of our childhood, those Easter baskets were filled with Brach’s jelly beans. Was there any other kind back then? It was only when we got older that Starburst jelly beans arrived on the scene and revolutionized Easter candy.
The Easter aisles at Target and the grocery store are packed with options for jelly beans now. To figure out which jelly bean is the one you should hope to see in your Easter basket, I enlisted the help of my wife, Caitlin Emma, for this edition of Ranked!
She came to this task armed with her own history of candy expertise (she’s a fan of Cadbury Mini Eggs … and Werther’s Originals) and a patience for my habit of constantly bringing home new varieties of candy or having to swing by Taco Bell to try the latest limited item. We spent a Friday evening after putting our daughter to bed going through six different brands of jelly beans. It was a serious process.
As you scroll these rankings, you might be asking, Where is Jelly Belly? Why didn’t you include them in this list? Well, I made the decision that Jelly Belly jelly beans aren’t an Easter thing. And, honestly, they’re kind of disgusting. You wanna induce vomiting? Give me a popcorn-flavored Jelly Belly jelly bean.
I also avoided introducing spinoffs of these standard brands into the mix. So no Starburst FaveReds or Brach’s All Reds.
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