Trader Joe's Chocolate Covered Dried Fruit

I noticed these the other day on my local TJ's "new items" display and of course took home a tub.

Here's part of what the Trader Joe's web site says about them:

We’ve sold a very similar item in our stores before, however, the previous version was not a Trader Joe’s private label product. This time around, this Chocolate Covered Dried Fruit is Trader Joe’s, through and through. As it happens in these situations, we asked ourselves, “Why redo something if you’re not going to improve it?” For us—always a rhetorical question. Indeed, we believe we have made some outstanding innovations and this unique candy is now better than ever.  

We upgraded the chocolate, using chocolate liquor and cocoa butter from West Africa, and vanilla from Madagascar. We also revisited the ratio between dried fruit and chocolate so that now, you get the fine taste of real dried cherries, apricots, strawberries, and blueberries (instead of pectin or juice-flavored pieces) perfectly balanced with rich white, dark, and milk chocolate. Finally, we improved the look of these candies, creating vibrant colors using only annatto (achiote seeds), beetroot, and vegetable juice.

By happy coincidence, I had a tub of the previous version of the product--sold by TJ's but not under its own name--sitting at home that I had not get gotten around to trying:

This gives me the unusual opportunity to try them side by side, which others won't be able to do, since the old one was discontinued before the new one appeared. [EDIT: I made that assumption when writing this post yesterday (July 14), but it may have been wrong. I was at the store again today (July 15), and found both products on the shelves, side by side. It's hard to imagine that that will continue for long--because why would it?--but at least for now you can buy both.]

Here's how they look side by side:

As you can easily see, the new TJ's-branded product is more muted in color, more pastel, less vibrant--but also less artificial. That's because in keeping with their longstanding policy, they won't sell anything under the store name that has artificial colors or flavors--which the "Dilettante" product was loaded with.

I wish I could tell you that the difference in taste was as dramatic as the difference in color, because that would be really interesting. But it's not. I go back and forth between the two tubs, trying each of the obvious counterparts back to back, and I just can't tell any consistent difference.

I'm not a big fan of either version, sadly. I should love them. I love dried fruit and I love chocolate. But these just don't highlight the fruit enough. You can mostly tell which fruit you're getting inside in advance by the size of the candy, with blueberries, cherries, strawberries, and apricots being in ascending order, though there's some overlap.

The problem is that if you didn't know ahead of time what kind of fruit is in the middle, you wouldn't be able to tell by eating--which is not just a shame, but an absolute crime. The only exception is the strawberries, which have a sufficiently distinct flavor to stand out. (The exterior seeds help, too.)

The main culprit is that the chocolate layers (yes, plural--more than one on every piece) are so thick that the chocolate completely overwhelms any taste of fruit by sheer volume.

Several times, in order to get around this issue, I would let one of the candies sit in my mouth long enough for the chocolate layers to melt away, then would chew and eat the fruit in the middle. This revealed a secondary culprit: the dried fruit just isn't very flavorful, again with the exception of the strawberries. The dried apricots were the most disappointing. With the chocolate layers stripped away, they look, feel, and taste much more like prunes than dried apricots--so much so that I would have sworn that's what they were, were it not for the list of ingredients on the tub.

These problems afflict both versions equally, as far as I can tell.

Will I buy it again? 

No, dammit. The chocolate:fruit ratio is just skewed way, way too high for me to enjoy them, and the fruit inside is almost devoid of identifiable fruitiness. These are nothing like TJ's superb chocolate-covered raisins, where the fruit and its chocolate coating get equal billing and beautifully complement each other.