Easter Candy Showdown: Peeps vs. Bunnies

Welcome to a showdown of miniature proportions, where fluffy sugar-coated marshmallows face off for the Peeps Lightweight Title! With Easter fast approaching, its time to look at the two major contenders for the ultimate marshmallow candy in this year's Easter Candy Showdown.

Those two contenders are the classic "Peeps" marshmallow chicks and the newer-age "Peeps" marshmallow bunnies. I'll be scoring them on a host of categories, from taste to bang for your buck. But rather than simply have them face off in the ring of my opinion, they'll be taking each other on with tiny lightsaber toothpicks! Thanks to these wonderful illustrations, you'll know which animal caricature has the last peep in this match.

Color While you can have both bunnies and chicks in any unnatural hue your tinted tongue desires, Peeps are most common in yellow. That's closer to the tint of a real-life chick, and it's more flattering on them. Chicks win!




Flavor Each color tastes slightly different thanks to the natural variation in food coloring flavor. Chicks and bunnies can be had in any bizarre hue, so that zesty orange can be had on any animal. Draw.




Texture Chicks have a slightly low surface-to-mallow ratio, leaving them with a little too much white fluff and much too little sugar granule coating. Bunnies have that ratio down much better, distancing them from simply being a multi-season marshmallow. Plus, there's nothing as satisfying as biting the ears off a candy bunny during the Easter season. Bunnies win!

Bang for your buck A pack of chicks is stuffed with five peeps and brags a 1 1/2 oz. net weight. A pack of bunnies carries four rabbits and only 1 1/8 ounces. Since the packs typically cost the same, under $1, it's pretty simple. Chicks win!



Cuteness I've always thought chicks look a bit odd, like they just got smacked in the back of the head and their eyes are still rolling around. Bunnies, on the other hand, are just plain adorable. Bunnies win!




Exclusivity It's a little harder to find bunnies -- normally a bad thing in the candy world. But surplus peeps become leftovers that linger on shelves for weeks, growing stale and hard and making you wish you'd never bought them. Bunnies win!



Originality We all know bunnies are just an attempt to spin off the Peeps brand. And while they're better than the Halloween or Christmas impostor Peeps, they still don't hold up to the original in the category. Chicks win!



And we're tied after seven rounds at a score of 3-3 with one draw! That means we go down to the tiebreaker, intangibles:


Intangibles Which would you rather have in your Easter basket, a chocolate bunny surrounded by little marshmallow bunnies or the variety of a chocolate bunny and some chicks? Unfortunately for bunnies, marshmallow chicks are just a more traditional pillar of Easter candy. Bunnies are crowded out by their chocolate brethren. Chicks win!

Congratulations to Chicks, the winner of the 2009 Easter Candy Showdown!

Sheetz of Friday afternoon fun

Some exciting news here at Rick's Food Critique: Next week I'll be launching a brand-new bi-weekly feature packed with the cheapest foods you can find. You may ask how that's different from my normal blogs, and the answer is simple. Normally I try to take price into account and stick to a relatively low budget. The new Friday feature will solely feature foods under $1.

Now that the promotional paragraph is out of the way, let's move on to today's topic: Sheetz. If you haven't spent time in a handful of states around Pennsylvania you might not have heard of the gas station with a special-order fast food restaurant in the back, and that's a shame. I've always enjoyed Sheetz, although I hadn't visited it recently. It's time to check up on the place.

A few years ago when I frequented Sheetz, the food was cheap and plentiful. Some of it, like the macaroni and cheese, was closer to plastic than food, yet it was still somehow satisfying. And more often than not the touchscreen menus offered generous quantities of decent quality food.

I'd heard a rumor the food has been going downhill lately, though. So I stopped by and ordered a Mad-To-Order pretzel melt, an old favorite. Four years ago my turkey pretzel melt would have come with any sauces I wanted upon piles and piles of hot sliced lunch meat.

The more things change, it seems, the less the stay the same. To say my pretzel melt had less meat than it would have four years ago is an understatement. The sauces (barbecue, honey mustard, ranch) were still available, but they all seemed like watered-down imitations of their former selves.

Maybe the recession took its toll and forced Sheetz to cut the quality of their food. Maybe my unscientific one food at one location sample of their menu isn't properly representative of the food quality as a whole. But this was the same location I previously frequented, and something was askew.

It's still a decently priced option, but my pretzel melt cost nearly five bucks. This drops Sheetz as a whole from a four spork joint to a three spork or even two and a half spork eatery.

Unfortunately, checking up on Sheetz turned out to be checking it down.

Ripping into baggies

Nabisco:

We need to talk. For some reason you've been putting progressively lower-quality bags in your boxes of crackers. Teddy Grahams, Nilla Wafers and Ritz Bits Sandwiches all refuse to be opened for at least five minutes before finally giving way with a giant tear down the side. Especially those Ritz Bits Sandwiches.

I know times are tough, but this has been going on for several years. First you couldn't breach the bag inside a box of Ritz Bits Cheese Sandwiches without splitting it down the side. That was circa 2006, when the economy was still strong.

Plus you still have a few brands that know how to bag'em. Triscuit bags still generally open properly, for instance. True, they don't pop apart with ease, but the top of the bag does part at the seams, allowing for optimal rolling up and the preservation of fresh crackers.

Don't tell me to get a pair of scissors, either. Unless we're dealing with expensive technological items that pose a serious risk of being removed from their plastic and smuggled out of the store to be sold on the black market, packaging should be removable without tools -- and even in the acceptable cases, that impenetrable packaging is as annoying as trying to balance an egg on its head during the solstice. The ability to use tools may be what separate us from monkeys, but the ability to design usable baggies is what separates product engineers from Neanderthals.

If this is a problem caused by different bag vendors for different products and various manufacturing facilities, it's time to take a fresh look at your supply chain. Do you buy resealable sandwich bags that can't open without tearing for your own home? Then why should anyone buy a box with a bag of crackers that do the same thing?

You shouldn't have to worry about finding those ten stray Chocolaty Chip Teddy Grahams that slipped out of the slit in the bag and bloated to unrecognizable balls because they soaked up all the moisture in the air. You won't hear me say this much, but don't worry about the food -- it's fine. Worry about the packaging.

Sincerely,

Rick

The Roastburger

Today I stopped by Arby's to try out their Bacon & Bleu "Roastburger." It's good, by the way. Tasty roast beef melded well with the usually handicapping soft bacon to make a four out of five spork main course. It's one of the few fast food meals that's actually worth more than five bucks.


My meal, which included curly fries and a drink, cost $5.93, keeping with my impression that Arby's is a little pricey. Still, it was worth the cost.

But there are two more important things I noticed while at the giant red hat.

The first is their drink selection. Every fast food chain has a bunch of soda, but soda isn't my scene. Its carbonation leaves me burping for the rest of the afternoon at inopportune times and it also makes my teeth feel positively grimy. Unfortunately most chains only offer non-soda drinkers the choice between iced tea or sugar-free lemonade.

That's a ridiculous choice. The tea is fine, but only offering sugar-free lemonade is uncalled for. Wendy's is the big offender here. They always offer sugar free but no regular lemonade, as if the only people who could possibly not want soda are watching their waistlines. Note to beverage engineers at fast food joints: Some of us choose lemonade because it's better than soda, not because we're on a diet. Relegating the non-soda society to the terrible aftertaste of artificial sweeteners is unnecessary, insulting and inexcusable.

The only lemonade at Arby's drink fountain was sugar free, so they deserve a little wrath on this front too. But they offered me a choice outside the terrible nuclear option of blue PowerAid you sometimes find at McDonald's -- SoBe Energy.

Now, the Energy flavor is by far not my favorite variation of SoBe. It's a little citrusy for my palette. But compared to my typical fast food soda fountain options, it was a Godsend. If I handed out Golden Straw Awards for best drink innovation, Arby's would be a good candidate for this drink.

The second great thing to come out of my visit to Arby's was their Spicy Three Pepper Sauce. I can't say how long they've had it -- I must admit to not frequenting the big red hat over the last three or four years -- but it's a great addition to the already wonderful option of Horsey Sauce.

Spicy Three Pepper Sauce isn't exactly scorching. Think Taco Bell Fire Sauce Hot -- enough to give good flavor but not nearly enough to call in the fire hose. It also has a nice buried sweetness to it that's surprisingly complex for a fast food condiment.

A better drink selection and great sauce-age can really put you over the top as a fast food joint. They make it okay that Arby's is a bit expensive. The devil is in the details. So is the dollar.