Favorite Day White Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Popcorn

It's still fall, so it's still pumpkin spice season. It's ubiquitous. It's inescapable. I do get sick of it each and every year, but I have to eat my fill of pumpkin spice first in order to get a big enough fix so that I don't crave it at all until next September. It's like intermittent fasting...except with pumpkin spice, and it plays out over months instead of hours. Okay, that's probably a bad analogy.

Anyway, I'm pretty close to my 2022 PS tipping point right now. Will the score of this product suffer as a result? Quite possibly.

The popcorn is pretty typical caramel corn in terms of texture, although it's a little on the stiff side. I think it's a result of the coating, but the product winds up feeling a little stale unfortunately.

The white chocolate is totally unevenly distributed. There are many pieces with no white chocolate at all. But other parts of the bag are nothing but enormous globs of white chocolate with a few popcorn pieces stuck to them. You can even see one of those globs in the photo, right in the middle of the see-through window on the bag.

Leaf shaped sprinkles? There really aren't many sprinkles to be found here. I guess it's possible most of them were shaken off the popcorn and wound up at the bottom of the bag. Even out of the few sprinkles I do see only one or two actually look like leaves. The others are just nondescript random shapes. Oh well. I mean...the idea was cute.

Flavor-wise, it's just too sweet. I like white chocolate in general, but it has to be in the right context. Neither the white chocolate sweetness nor the pumpkin spice elements shine the way I'd want them to. I'd also want the popcorn to be a little more salty in this instance to balance out the sweetness.

I like the idea of this product in theory, but the execution is just a tad sloppy in my professional opinion. $4.49 for the 7 oz bag. It's too expensive, as well. Although...what isn't these days?

I give this popcorn 6 out of 10 stars.

Favorite Day Pumpkin Spice White Chocolate Espresso Beans

Not long ago, I looked at Trader Joe's Pumpkin Spice Espresso Beans. All things considered, the wifey and I liked them quite a bit. We were thinking about picking up another pack or two but before we could get back to TJ's, the wifey spotted these little morsels at the local Target.

It's the same deal pretty much: crunchy espresso beans covered in a candy-esque shell, flavored with typical pumpkin or pumpkin pie spices. But there was definitely something working in the Trader Joe's version that isn't working here for some reason.

I think maybe the candy coating in this case is a tad too sweet and the pumpkin spice elements are out of balance. There's a bit of that scented candle effect. Somehow the natural flavor of the coffee bean isn't as rich in this case. Part of that could be that these beans are significantly smaller than their Joesian counterparts.

I can't eat more than one or two of these beans before my mouth tires of the flavor. Definitely don't think this will be a repeat purchase. I might have been a little more lenient on these if I hadn't tried a superior product from a different store brand so recently. Plus, at $4.49 this product is four and a half times the price of the other version. Granted, it's a bigger bag, but I think small and cheap is the way to go with a product like this. Not like you're going to be eating these by the handful in either case. My wife agrees this product isn't nearly as good as Trader Joe's bag of pumpkin-flavored espresso beans, but she'll probably not have too tough a time finishing our package.

I give these espresso beans 6 out of 10 stars.