What is your favorite snack? My personal choice is fruit snacks. I used to get them every day in the cafeteria at lunch. This changed after they changed my preferred brand of fruit snacks, Welch’s, to Mott’s. This got me thinking. What is the best brand of fruit snacks?
I started asking my friends what their favorites were, and that led to the idea of a survey because it’s important to be scientific and do research.
I created a 4-question survey and got 79 responses. The first question was what flavor of fruit snacks is the best, fruit or berry? This showed a clear favorite: original fruit flavor. It was about a ⅔ split with 69.6% of the votes for fruit-flavored and 30.4% for berry- flavored.
The second question asked about the best brand. This became a highly debated conversation between my friends, and some even brought up brands that others weren’t familiar with yet.
The survey showed a very close top three. Welch’s, my personal favorite, won the vote at 22.8%. The second was the Aldi Black Forest brand at 21.5%. The third was Mott’s with 20.3%.
Notable other brands were: Annie’s, Scooby Doo, and Walmart Fruity Smiles. Out of the bottom three, Annie’s came in with 16.5% followed by the Scooby Doo brand at 15.2%.
These two brands specifically were ones associated with good childhood memories that my group of friends shared, and we all agreed that while delicious, organic, and healthy, Annie’s seemed sub par in the heat due to the stickiness. Scooby Doo were the opposite and tended to be hard and certainly unhealthy.
This conversation also brought up a heated debate on whether Gushers were considered fruit snacks or simply candy, so I added that as a question to the poll.
Surprisingly, it was very even with an almost 50/50 split. On one hand, 53.2% of individuals said that Gushers were not fruit snacks and the remaining 46.8% said they were.
To end the survey, I added one simple free-response question: Is there a better snack than fruit snacks? The audience was split as 45.6% said there isn’t a better snack.
There were many alternate snack options proposed.
The largest alternate snack preference was Goldfish. “Fruit snacks are LeBron, goldfish are Jordan (Jordan’s the goat).” Real fruit and cheese-related snacks were the next most popular. There were a few oddballs such as milk, and one strong option of “literally anything else.” Overall, the consensus was that fruit snacks are good, but there are better options.
While I still believe that Welch’s have the best flavor and texture, the survey and conversations opened my mind to see what other snack possibilities exist. Fruit snacks are still a popular choice regardless of the brand. One final question still remains. Are Gushers really a fruit snack?
