I've handed in my notice, so for the next couple of week I have some time on my hands! :-)
I've handed in my notice, so for the next couple of week I have some time on my hands! :-)
Member since:31.07.2002
Reviews:76
Members who trust:48
I was never much of a chewing gum fan until I gave up milk in my coffee. (I've since given up caffeine in it too - coffee now is a truly joyless experience for me!) I found that after a black coffee, my mouth tasted so utterly disgusting I just needed something to cut through it. This was why I turned to chewing gum.
I don't know about everyone else, but I view chewing gum as a pretty boring essential daily item. Yes, it was exciting when I was a kid - purely because my Dad disapproved of it - but back then I didn't drink coffee and only chewed juicy fruit, because other gum tasted of mint, and that reminded me of toothpaste - which no kid likes. Peppermint chewing gum is just a bit, well, dull.
I love a novelty though, so the recent influx of "exciting" chewing gums has been quite expensive for me. I think Wrigleys started it all off with their Fusion gums, and then Trident have started bringing out all manner of crazy flavours, and suddenly it's almost impossible to buy gum in those thin soft sticks we used to have as kids. It's all in crunchy tablets now, with or without liquid centres. Over-packaged and over-priced, but exciting and new. I can't move for chewing gum stands in my local Sainsburys.
Needless to say, I've tried a lot of the ones on offer. A lot of the flavours are pretty much "hubba bubba for adults"-style, which I must say doesn't really appeal to me any more.
So after trying around and getting bored, I settled on the slightly more conservative sounding Extra Fusion flavour - "Peppermint with a twist of Berry". Frankly, it sounded disgusting, but it was cheaper than Trident and sounded more interesting than the massive pack of boring peppermint gum I was carrying up to the check out in morrisons.
First impressions - it's hugely over-packaged!! Where I'm used to a little foil package for my gum, this stuff comes in a huge box (well, about 2 credit cards long and a centimetre thick), with a blister pack inside. What's wrong with foil?! This stuff makes me seriously worry about my carbon footprint! All this to package nine pieces of gum seemed a little bit much.
Once I'd got over the packaging shock, I popped out a piece of the gum. It's a little bigger than a normal piece of gum. With normal Extra (my boring gum brand of choice), I'm strictly a 2 pieces a go girl. With this stuff, I only need one, which is nice.
It chews like, well, chewing gum. It does taste pretty good though - the hint of berry goes surprisingly well with the peppermint, making it much much nicer to chew than their standard gum, without it being too sweet. The flavour lasts too - I tend to get bored of chewing gum after about 10 minutes, but after this time I still have a lot of flavour in the gum - more so than I would with their normal peppermint stuff. The flavour also seems to stick around my mouth for longer after getting rid of it than normal gum would - another bonus.
You should be able to find this stuff for sub-50p prices, which is actually ok - a little more expensive than "normal" gum, but not extortionately so. You will recognise it by the huge blue and red cardboard box proudly saying "Extra Fusion" on the front.
Because this is sugar free gum, it contains Phenylalanine - the stuff that is put into most sugar free sweeties which can cause laxative effects. It'll take a lot of Phenylalanine to send you to the toilet, but nevertheless I would advise against chewing 20 packs of this a day - try to stick to one or two.
All in all, recommended - the flavour is great, the longevity is great, the size of the pieces is perfect. Negative points are the ridiculous over-packaging and possibly the price (but not really!)
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Aug 21st, 2008
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