Cumberland Farms Diner Side Snacks--Watch us suffer live special

Product #1 Sweet Potato Fries
Origin: Cumberland Farms

First looks

Nick:
I'm very suspicious right now. These are billed as sweet potato fries, and I guess I don't see why you couldn't take a sweet potato, chop it into a french fry shape, fry it and sell it in a bag, but these smell like stale cinnamon and it's giving me pause. Also, the first ingredient is corn meal. Guess what the sweet potato part is? "Sweet Potato Powder". Is this just sweet-potato flavored corn meal?!!?!?! Katie, what do you make of this?

Katie:
Maybe it's failed astronaut food?  I'm a little scared that this is "food" in the same way saw dust and shoe leather are food during a long siege. At least it smells nice!

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
Oh, these are weird. They're definitely puffed corn meal with "sweet potato" flavoring on them. They kind of taste like an airy Cheeto with fake sweet potato flavoring on it instead of cheese. The texture is actually quite nice, and I think I'd like this with cheese on it, but the sweet potato flavoring itself is, uh, not great; the corn has a sweet taste that clashes with the salt and sweet potato flavor in a way I'm not really enjoying very much. Swing and a miss, I think. Also, not a great sign the first product in this live spectacular is lying to us about what it is. I trusted you, Cumbies!!! We should have gotten some of that blueberry soda that turns your poop green!

Katie:
Ew! Nicholas, no one is going to read your comments if you keep talking about that. I'm telling Mickey and he's going to shake his head disapprovingly as soon as we get to Disney World.
Anyway, these chips were...not gross, I guess. They tasted enough like sweet potato and zero like butt so that's something. I'm struggling to describe why the chips don't work. You've heard of the uncanny valley, I'm assuming. These chips taste enough like sweet potato to make me think of a sweet potato but also not enough to really be like one so I'm in the uncomfortable uncanny valley of flavoring.

Product #2
Product: Parmesan and Garlic Fries
Origin: Duh.

First looks

Katie:
Oh boy, Nick is going to hate these. I'm not sure I'm going to like them either. They look like green beans after Bunnicula ate them. There's no smell to speak of so that might be a point in its favor. Usually, Parmesan doesn't translate well to fake processed cheese. My hope is to like at least one of these but I don't think it's going to be this one.

Nick:
Well, I don't have any worries about the texture based on the last fries, but the taste... I mean, I love garlic, and Parmesan is also, uh, a thing that exists, so maybe... hmm. Well, I don't have high hopes for this, but you never know. Maybe I'll love them and we'll be stopping at Cumbies all the time to get these and that soda I'm not supposed to talk about because Mickey Mouse is mad now.

Post-bite thoughts

Katie:
Bland. It's like someone made garlic bread but forgot they were out of garlic except for a few atoms of garlic powder in an expired spice container. I didn't get any Parm taste but that's probably good. I can't imagine it would have added anything. These were fine. If one of my work peeps had a bag and gave me some, I'd eat like three sticks again but I'd be wishing they were something else. 0 for 2, Cumbies.

Nick:
Spoiler alert, we put these in order of weirdness from least to most, so if it's 0-2 right now, it's probably not going to get above 0 in the hit column. As for these, "bland" sums it all up. I've noticed with some flavors, like when we try a "bacon" item made by vegans, it's just salt, and apparently whoever made this is a vampire who's never tasted garlic because it's just salty. Tastes like vaguely salty nothing. Not good, dog.

Product #3
Product: Beer-battered onion rings

First looks

Nick:
Well, I don't like beer and I don't like onion rings, which would normally be a bad sign, but the theme here seems to be at best a passing resemblance to the item these things are imitating, so, maybe it won't be too bad? Let me guess: It's going to be cornmeal shaped into another item with a sprinkling of flavoring on it and salt. They actually do smell slightly oniony, so we'll see, but I don't have my hopes up.

Katie:
I like onion rings. I don't drink beer but I like it in the cheese fondue at The Melting Pot and other foods. I find myself agreeing with my comrade, the trend for these has not be good so far. Maybe they'll at least taste like onions! Or at the very least, not like a stinky foot.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
Well, they don't taste anything like beer or onions. They actually taste like really good BBQ potato chips. In fact, if you just think of them as round, airy BBQ potato chips, these are actually really tasty. I think this is the only item we'd tried so far where I'm not only going to finish the bag, but I would get more. I'd suggest just rebranding these as like "BBQ-Os" or something and I think they'd be a hit! I'm glad these don't taste anything like what they're supposed to!

Katie:
There's onion if you squint. As if someone took french onion soup then added way too much water. For size comparison, the chip is Godzilla and the onion-flavor is a human standing next to Godzilla. I'd have some of Nick's bag if he gets these again but I couldn't handle a whole bag on my own. Look for these next time you go to Cumbies (if there is one near you).

Product #4

Product: Mac and Cheese Bites

First looks

Katie:
When Nick opened the bag, he gagged. Oh jeez. This isn't going to be a good one. At least we fulfilled my hope of liking one thing from this experiment! We suffer so you don't have to. "What do Mac and Cheese bites from Cumberland Farms taste like?!" you no longer need to shout in agony as you toss and turn in sweat-soaked sheets at 3 am. You're welcome. Like a few other things we've reviewed, these have no smell...which helps them hide from predators. I got nothing. I don't even like real mac and cheese bites. Ffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

Nick:
I got a snootful of old foot smell when opening the bag. The back promises "tangy cheddar," but since we live in a world gone mad where nothing tastes like anything it's supposted to anymore, who knows what this is actually going to be? Watermelon? Blue peaches? Old butt juice? We'll see; I'm not terribly confident whatever flavoring they put on the corn this time is going to be great, but you never know.

Post-bite thoughts

Katie:
It's oddly sweet. It tastes like very mass-produced--albeit well-meaning--buffet mac and cheese. The kind where the cheese is so mild and so inoffensive that even stupid babies can eat it. It's not awful, you think as you scoop another spoonful into your mouth because the line to get the food was so long and you really don't want to go back up there especially seeing as how your SO isn't back to the table yet and you don't want anyone to steal your stuff so you have to keep eating this bland af mac and cheese, but it's not exactly good.

Nick:
These are pretty good! They taste like someone added too much milk to Kraft macaroni and cheese so it doesn't taste like much and then they added sugar to try and cover up the crime. The sweetness works surprisingly well with the creaminess of the cheese; I have no idea how they managed to get the flavoring on these little corn cylinders to actually taste like creamy (albiet very cheap) cheese, but they did it. I'm as shocked as everyone else. Hey, a happy ending!

Stubborn 2: stubborner

Product: Stubborn Soda--Root Beer
Origin: Florida

First looks

Nick:
This is our second Stubborn Soda product; with the cream soda we liked it but were a little put off by the agave taste. This stuff doesn't mention agave, and I hope it isn't in here; the fruity taste was OK with cream soda, but when I drink root beer I don't want to be tasting fruit. (I don't like Barq's either. Remember those annoying ads about how it had bite? It doesn't have bite; it just tastes fucking weird.)

Katie:
Oh wow, I just got it. Barq's has...bite! Ha, that's actually stupidly funny. The smell of this root beer is odd. I'm not sure what the smell is but it's not like any other root beer I've had. In our area, Stewart's Root Beer is the gold standard so I feel it would be unfair to hold this to those high standards but it would be nice if we could find another awesome root beer. That being said, we did take our extra Bear Wizz to a paint and sip with my mom so there's that (don't think she liked it!).

Post-sip thoughts

Nick:
Mmm, not for me, I don't think. The label says "Classic Root Beer Flavor" and that's what you get here; I like mine a little sweeter (like Stewart's. Yes, I'm being unfair. Welcome to the real world, Stubborn Soda root beer!). It's better than Bear Wizz; it kind of tastes like less-nasty Saranac root beer. I'll finish what we have, but I don't think I'd get more of this particular flavor.

Katie:
There's an odd aftertaste I don't like. Let me steal Nick's bottle (I'm drinking out of the glass in the picture) to see what's in here. There's stevia in it. I feel like that's the weird sweet but not-good-sorta-like-medicine taste at the end. Kudos to the soda for being fair trade and not afraid to use genetically-modified products.

Nick's PS: I don't know if it's because Katie just mentioned it, but man, that aftertaste sure sticks with you, and it's not nice. Get the stevia out of here and I'd probably like this better. Yikes.

So like tic-tacs?

Product: Zazers Tidbite
Origin: China

First looks

Nick:
Umm... they look like tic-tacs. I'm sure the green apple is going to be disgusting, but the rest of the flavors look good. I'm a little confused by the bite missing out of the lower right hand corner; the container is molded so that it looks like someone with a very small mouth, perhaps a confused baby shark, bit the lower right hand corner of the container away, but then there's still plastic there which doesn't make sense. Katie, can you make any sense of this?

Katie:
I think it's to make the container not just look like a straight up copy of the tic-tacs one. Er, I mean baby sharks! With lasers. The candy looks like the stereotypical seed shape--rounded bottom, pointy top. They don't seem especially gross but I've been fooled before. I can hear Nick crunching them but who knows if that's good or bad.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
Pretty good! The orange isn't great (I don't tend to like fake orange flavor) and the lemon is just OK, but the grape and cherry (well, "grape" and "cherry") are very nice. They're like slightly bigger, harder tic-tacs. I didn't even try green apple. Green apple can fuck off. If I was driving through the desert and I saw green apple dying of thirst, I wouldn't even run it over, I'd leave it there to think about what it did as it slowly expired. Fuck off, green apple. You bastard. Why are all the green things green apple? Bring back lime! I'd even take kiwi. I like the taste of kiwi, it's a texture thing with the fruit. Plus they look like hairy balls. I don't trust kiwi, but I'll take it over green f'n apple any day of the week.

Katie:
The flavors are way too intense for me. Lemon is not the crisply citrus lemon of a Skittle but an in your face squeeze right from the fruit. Orange is more orange than any real slice I've ever had. I tend to like green apple and even I thought it was bad. Grape was not even. If you are one of those nutters who likes really intense flavors--like those atomic airheads or whatever they are--these are for you.

Rainbow laces

Product: Laces
Origin: Turkey

First looks

Nick:
The last Bebeto item we had wasn't very good, so I'm a little skeptical of what we have here. These are supposted to be raspberry and tangerine flavored licorice; they smell like kinda fruity sugar, which is what I'm hoping for. Don't let me down again, Bebeto!

Katie:
More gummy stuff. Skip. For my Wikipedia Random Page adventure, I'm going to blow your minds. There are Wikipedia pages from...THE FUTURE. Feast your eyes on this page from 2098. A solar eclipse will occur so be sure to order your spectral eclipse glasses now so you can view this amazing event (the joke being that it's 90 years in the future and unless we transplant our consciousnesses into robot bodies, many of us will be dead by then!). What is more interesting is that there are a bunch more calendars than I was aware of--I knew about the Hebrew calendar, the Chinese one, and the Islamic one but not the others. It's actually kind of neat to scroll through and realize how many different ways there are to measure time.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
The pink stuff - tangerine, supposedly - is fine; it kinda just tastes like mildly sour fruit. The blue stuff, though.... my boy, this is the flavor all true warriors strive for; it's the long-awaited, never disappointing, super fake super sweet blue raspberry flavor. You did it, Bebito! I'm gonna eat this all up until 2098, which I just found out is the 9th year of the 2090s decade!

Katie:
It would be cooler if we used the Holocene calendar so it could be the year 12098. Every time you'd write the day, it would feel like living in a sci-fi movie.

Pickle Rick!!!!!!!!!!

Product: Maple bourbon bread and butter pickles
Origin: Brooklyn Brine Company

First looks

Katie:
Pickles from Bucky and Steve's hometown so you know they're going to be good. I mean...okay that has nothing to do with it. It's not like Bucky and Steve own this company and run it during their down time...as cool as that would be. Anyway. The pickles smell mostly like a regular bread and butter pickle would.  I have a good feeling about these; I love bread and butter pickles, maple is delicious, and any food I've ever had flavored with bourbon has been good. Don't let me down, pickles from Brooklyn that aren't really made by Bucky and Steve but would be awesome if they were!

Nick:
(Open on the Brooklyn Brine Co)
STEVE: Boy, there's nothing more relaxing than making pickles in between Avengers missions, even though I'm a free agent or something after Civil War, so that in every Marvel movie it's not like "Why isn't Captain America here? Where's Iron Man?"
BUCKY: I agree. I sure hope Katie enjoys eating our pickles because she is the most cool, powerful, and attractive.
STEVE: Eating our pickles.
BUCKY: What?
STEVE: Like a double entendre.
BUCKY: I'm so proud of you.

Post-bite thoughts

Katie:
What the actual fuck, pickles??? These were nasty! All you had to do was make bread and butter pickles, which last I checked are sweet not salty and gross. There was no maple taste at all. It was just straight up salt mixed with awful. What happened guys? Did you just pull a bunch of words out of a hat, slap it on the jar, add the word Brooklyn for authenticity and call it a day? I really, really wanted to like these but damn, dude. I don't even have more words to describe how disappointed I am right now.

Nick:
I retract my earlier fan-fiction sketch; there's no way Bucky or Steve would turn out something this bad. These pickles must be a HYDRA plot to disappoint innocent pickle fans or something, because I don't know how else these turned out bad. Bread and butter pickles are supposed to be sweet, you dumbasses! Like Katie said, there is 0% maple in this, and me, the Ol' Maple Kid, would know. These just taste like old fart salt, and they're really limp and gross (I mean, I know a pickle isn't usually super crunchy when it's packed in brine, but these are like mushy and feel nasty in your mouth). Boo, Brooklyn Brine Co! I say boo to you!

Dark chocolate banana slices

Product: Dark chocolate bananas by Next Organics
Origin: Sri Lanka, Mexico, and the US

First looks

Nick:
Ooo, I don't know about these. I'm really worried what kind of shape the banana is going to be in once I bite into that dark chocolate. I like nice fresh bananas (in maple syrup or on top of cereal), and I'm afraid there's going to be some kind of gummy, dehydrated nastiness on the inside of these. Also, the back of the bag reads a little unhinged; in addition to being in ALL CAPS, it yells about how these snacks are "THE WAY IT WAS MEANT TO BE" and "THESE ARE TRUE BANANAS". If you see me at the airport yelling about true bananas as the NEXT ORGANICS way, please kidnap me and bring me to a debrainwashing location. These bananas better be spectacular.

Katie:
I was thinking they were going to be more banana chips than plain sliced bananas dipped into chocolate. Oh no. Nick is making disgusted groaning sounds as I struggle to type my thoughts on these. This is not going to be fun.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
OH MY GOD. There is no sugar in this. I should have realized what they meant by "organic dark chocolate" (sorry, "ORGANIC DARK CHOCOLATE") is no-sugar-added, absolutely disgusting, straight from the deepest pit of Hell "chocolate". And the banana inside... it's worse than I could have possibly imagined. It's like you die and you get to Hell and you're impaled on a burning bed of nails and Satan comes by and is like "How's Hell," and you're like "This sucks worse than I could have imagined" and he's like hahahaha, watch this and pulls out this bag and two big fat demon guys pry your mouth open and Satan gets ready to pour this snack into your mouth and suddenly being impaled on a bed of white-hot nails forever seems like a nice vacation. How do you fuck up putting chocolate on a banana? I'm really angry about this. Stuff like ginger candy is hopeless, but this is such an easy snack to make and it's so, so bad. F-. Ugh, I can still taste the desiccated banana corpse and fake, no-sugar chocolate.

Katie:
In the far future, humanity is kept as pets by their benevolent synthetic overlords. Treating their creators like hamsters in cages, the robots build their humans fun enclosures with cool multicolored mazes and wheels to run around in. Next Organics, the intergalactic people food company, is searching for the next people kibble to serve up to posh synthetics who want to give their pampered pets a treat. MarketBot#XJ917 remembers humans once loved a yellow fruit (beninos?) and that they continue to love chocolate.  Unfortunately, beninos appear to be extinct according to the database of ancient human foodstuffs.  Undaunted, MarketBot#XJ917 has the drones (actual drones flying around with little lab coats painted on) in R&D whip up some approximated beninos to include in Next Organics' new people kibble--Dark Chocolate Beninos. Some doofus makes an error that is caught too late and the product ends up shipping as Dark Chocolate Bananas.  The space elevator is loaded up with crates of the stuff and sent up the cable but a tachyon storm opens up, swallowing the chocolate-covered lab-approximated beninos and sending them hurtling into the past where they are eventually sold at Marshalls to the delight of no one.

More ginger

Product: Ginger Candy--Gimme more mango!
Origin: California

First looks

Katie:
The last time we tried ginger candy it didn't work out so well. The smell is kind of nice--a subtle ginger and fruity scent. It's difficult to describe. The candy is a little sticky to the touch and is coated in white powder. I hope it's sugar.

Nick:
I've got a real bad feeling about this. The last ginger candy was nightmarishly bad, and even if this is better, this is apparently mango-flavored. How the hell do mango and ginger go together? I'm keeping the garbage can handy for maximum speed spitting out and slam-dunking the bag into. (Also, one of the candies, despite being individually wrapped, blew up in the bag and made the rest of these sticky.) I think ginger candy is just a bad idea all around. Prove me wrong.

Post-bite thoughts

Katie:
Holy crap. The ginger is also very, very intense with this candy. At first, I was put off by the too-chewy texture but thought the mango flavor was a nice sweet note alongside the ginger burn. But then! The ginger exploded in my mouth like the Death Star, spewing forth fiery chunks. Dial it way back on the ginger and make it a hard candy then this might be good. As it is, dear sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster, run from this. Run and pray for his noodly appendages to embrace you.

Nick:
Oh my god. I was not proved wrong. This tastes like someone chewed mango gum, stuck it to a tree and then you came along and plucked the hard, chewy, gross mango gum off the tree and put it in your mouth for some reason. Why would people make this??? Who is responsible for this? Absolutely shameful. F-

Promotional nuts bag

Product: Happy Belly Sweet & Spicy Trail Mix

Origin: USA

First looks

Nick: 

Happy Belly is Amazon's food label; I don't know why they decided to make trail mix of all things, but this looks and smells OK. I'm sure my belly will be happy with it, but I'm more worried about what my mouth is going to think. (Do they make Happy Mouth food? Happy Butthole food for when you're done? "Slides right out!") Okay, I'm done being gross. I don't think I'm going to be allowed to go first again for a while.

Katie:

I think this lost me when the bag warned "caution: may contain an occasional shell fragment". I already am not a nut fan and now I have to worry about shells? This is almost as bad as those shucky sucky ones. I'm not very optimistic. I'm sure if you like eating nuts, these are probably your jam but if you don't like eating nuts like me...it's not going to be your thing.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:

Well, technically, Katie, this is almost all non-nut, as the peanut is neither a pea nor a nut - it's a legume!!! Thanks for teaching me that, Bobby's World! Remember that show? It had Howie Mandel as his dad, and his mom was like "Oh don'tcha know" and Bobby had a huge head and his shirt never fit right or something? Maybe his shorts didn't fit, either way you could always see his bellybutton because his shirt and his shorts didn't combine to cover his tummy the right way and I guess Howie Mandel and his mom never cared enough to get him clothes that fit. Mostly I just remember that peanuts are actually a legume.

As for this snack mix, it's not bad, but I'm not sure how much I would eat; it's way more spicy than sweet, and after just a few handfuls it starts building up a surprisingly powerful spice burn. I think this needs a few more butter toffee peanuts and a bit less spice and it would be a winner, but as it is it's just a little too hot for this little baby.

Katie:

Nope. 

The Great Extrusion

Product: BBQ Corn Mix
Origin: New York City!!!

First looks

Nick:
Hey, this is a bag, not a box - shouldn't it be the nutbag you know what, never mind now that I'm seeing that typed out. There's not much to go on from the bag; it looks like it's just corn with BBQ flavoring on it, which seems hard to mess up. Even better, guess what the main ingredient is? Extruded corn balls! If y'all know me, you know I never shut up about extruded corn balls. "Extruded corn balls!!!!!" I'll bellow, kicking the door to Katie's room open at 6 AM and firing my M16 into the ceiling, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage. So, high hopes for these.

Katie:
Extruded is not a pleasing word. It should not be associated with food except in post production.  These look unappealing and smell bad. Nick has the bag open on the other side of the couch and the smell is wafting over here. It's like a bad bean fart. I don't want to put bad bean farts in my mouth. Also, despite the fact that this says New York City in multiple places on the bag...it says 'Product of Spain' in tiny letters on the back. So we stole this from Spain? This is like...plagiarized corn mix? Someone alert the APA, we got some plant plagiarizers over here.

Post-bite thoughts

Nick:
THEY MESSED UP THE EXTRUDED CORN BALLS. I'm standing in the rain firing my M16 into the sky crying sexily right now at how bad these are. The texture is fine - as always the extruded corn balls are 10/10 - but the taste... wow. What happened? This isn't BBQ; it tastes like a huge piece of pepper farted into an old cigarette and then I had to smoke the pepper fart cigarette. These are real bad, dude. What the hell happened here?  Terrible! (Or, as they say in Spain, el terrible![That looks like you'd pronounce it the same way, but you go 'el ter-ee-blay'. True facts])

Katie:
These corn mix mess-ups are bad. I'm imagining a GOLD STAR vegan (someone who's never eaten an animal product in their life) who has never eaten barbeque before--because they don't eat meat--made this. "It's like spicy, right?" they ask, reaching for a single pepper flake with which to flavor their extruded corn balls. "I hope they can handle how real this is!" Goldie exclaims, burying the one pepper flake under mounds of salt and sunflower oil (sunflowers have oil now? Jeezy, the last thing I used a sunflower for was to fashion it into a kickass staff so I could pretend to be Donatello...course that was like last week so...).

Bow-ties are cool

Product: Pasta bow-ties--meatball parm
Origin: USA

First looks

Katie:
I thought these were going to have a filling. The smell is just awful. I know we pick on the smell of things quite often in first looks but damn. Now, I love Parmesan reggiano and eat it in chunks on the couch. I love provolone that is aged so hard it tingles my mouth when I eat it. I can handle stinky cheese. This is not stinky cheese. This is like warmed over feet stink. Bleck. I'm hoping this will taste better than it smells.

Nick:
Like Katie I thought these were going to have a filling, but no, they're just broken chip shards covered in flavoring. And the smell - my god, the smell. It smells like a pair of old stinky feet ate a bunch of rotten cheese and then farted for a thousand years. I really, really hope these taste NOTHING like they smell, but frankly I'm convinced this whole product is a lie and possibly an elaborate money-laundering scheme because I don't know how it could be even half as bad as it looks and smells like otherwise.

Post-bite thoughts

Katie:
I can't decide if I like these or I hate 'em. There is a meatball flavor in there. The crunch is good. But...I can't decide. I actually had to stop typing, try a few more, and ponder. I'm going to say no on these. I think they need more flavoring or something. Oh my gosh this review is lame. Skip this and go read Nick's.

Nick:
Oh, man, these are bad. They don't taste as gross as they smell - thank god; I'm not sure anything could - and instead they taste like extremely bad, cheap "pizza" flavoring. Like, these taste worse than, and less like pizza than, a bag of pizza flavored chee-tos we got at the gas station for a dollar. Just tastes like super cheap ketchupy marinara sauce with a slight bitter foot-y cheese on top of it. Barf.