M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

“They melt in your heart, not in your OH MOTHER OF GOD SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.”

~Rejected M&M slogan

In 1941, Forrest Mars, Sr., son of the Mars Company founder Frank C. Mars, patented a process for tempering a hard shell of chocolate around chocolate pellets in order to prevent the candies from melting.  Production immediately began under the name M&M Limited (named for Mars and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey’s chocolate with a 20% stake in the product), with an agreement to only use Hershey chocolate.  These button-shaped candies exploded in popularity during the second World War due to their durability, and the shells were given bright colors such as yellow, green, red, and violet to go along with standard brown-colored shells.  And with that, an American institution was created.

These “m” printed candies are now sold in over 100 countries, but remain the most popular to-go chocolate snack for Americans everywhere.  The simple elegance of the coated milk chocolate delivers a burst of flavor with each individual candy, and just thinking about M&Ms while reading this article has you saying, “Goddamn it, I really want a bag of M&M’s right now.”  And you should.

Throughout the years we’ve been sampling the best of America, we’ve learned through painful, gut-wrenching trial and error, that sometimes the best American ideas are cruelly marred by our at-times overzealous imaginations.  Yes, the same good intentions and terrible execution that gave us Watermelon Oreos has befallen the perfection that is the M&M candy.  And, as is our sworn duty, we are here to let you know that these mistakes exist, because it’s only when we see those we care about at their ugliest that we can truly learn to love their beauty.  Or we just like telling you about terrifying candies.  However you want to look at it.

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

This might be a tangent completely unrelated to the rest of this article, but did you know that Mars lets you make custom M&Ms that have pictures and words on them?  While that does allow you to eat M&M’s that say “Insert Awesome Here” or “I Wish I Were Bourbon” (which we may or may not have just ordered for our office) they also advertise that you can/should make M&M’s printed with pictures of your loved ones.  That is completely terrifying and unacceptable.  If someone ever had a birthday party at their place and decided to have a bowl of candies with their face printed in a dot matrix on them, we’d start looking for bodies.  No one should ever make candy under the guidelines of “would you like to eat my visage?”  That’s just thoroughly unsettling.

Speaking of unsettling, as delicious as M&M’s are in regular form (or even, we’ll admit, peanut butter, because peanut butter M&M’s are not bad at all) sometimes the Mars Company has gotten a little too overambitious.  And, just like a Valentine’s Day gift that says “I am eating the face of my girlfriend,” these following products are examples of things that just shouldn’t have any association with tiny chocolate buttons.

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M’s

When M&M’s announced that 2014 will see the release of a birthday cake flavored candy, we thought though that sounded pointless, and a little gross, at least birthday cake primarily contains chocolate.  Yes, adding some icing flavor to an M&M might be a little excessive and unappetizing enough to make this list, but it’s not so abhorrent to make anyone go, “Oh God, why why are you doing this?”  Then we discovered that the Mars Corporation has previously delved into the cake-flavored-M&M realm before, and that it was more terrifying than anything we could have possibly imagined.

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results.  The Mars Corporation found this definition limiting, as their definition of insanity involves taking something pure and delicious and throw terrifying flavors at it until their R&D staff breaks down in tears screaming, “YOU’VE KILLED IT MY GOD YOU’VE RUINED M&M’S FOREVER,” so they decided to take white chocolate M&M’s, add carrot cake flavoring, and then put the “female” M&M character on the cover in bunny ears and a seductive look on her face, because when you take away all the light only darkness remains.

These were released just for the 2013 Easter Holiday, which makes sense since carrot cake makes you think of the Easter Bunny, and also people would have been more upset at the Mars Corporation if they had decided to ruin a holiday that people got more excited about, so should really count our blessings.  Thank God they left the Fourth of July out of their nefarious gross chocolate plans.  Could you imagine?

Coconut M&M’s

In 2009, M&M’s released a limited edition “Coconut M&M’s” to help rectify the fact that Mounds bars were the only candy that no one ever took from the trick or treat basket every year.  As there apparently must have been a market for chocolate candies that make kids go, “Oh, goddamn it, this one tastes like fucking coconut, and also I’m five years old” as their first ever uttered curse word, it was made a permanent fixture in the M&M family in 2010.  You can currently find it in retail stores without too much difficulty, all you need is a few bucks and a coworker on your Secret Santa list who you really hate.

You might consider this flavor “normal” compared to some of the other items on this list, but that doesn’t mean you should eat coconut M&M’s.  No one actually likes the taste of artificially-flavored-coconut except for the chemists who first designed it in a lab and the people they subsequently infected to carry out their heinous plots.  Basically, we’re just saying that if you have a friend that walks up to you munching on coconut flavored M&M’s, we’re so sorry but nothing of them remains in that fleshy husk, you need to flee town immediately.  Leave behind anything that won’t be missed.  There’s no time! 

Strawberried Peanut Butter M&M’s

We know what you’re thinking.  “Oh God, that’s a disgusting combination.  That sounds just foul.  That has offended me in ways I didn’t know I could be offended.  Why oh why would M&M’s degrade themselves like that?  Doing a Transformers tie in?  The monsters!”  Of course, after that initial shock sets in, you’ll see that they also decided to take strawberries, mix them with peanut butter, and cover it in chocolate, and now you’re grabbing random jelly beans a handful at a time and eating them at the same time because no matter how gross the combination of liquorish and buttered popcorn might taste, it’ll at least distract you from the thought of “strawberried peanut butter.”

This limited edition flavor was released in 2009 as a tie in to the release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Actually, the flavor-combination makes sense when you think about the theme of the movie they’re being used to promote.  The Transformers are machines that are more than meets the eye, and strawberried peanut butter M&M’s are candies that make you want to cry.  The ad copy practically writes itself.

Even the poor orange M&M bastards they put on the label here know they’re taking part in something that’s patently ridiculous.  They’re basically looking at each other with the same look of every boyfriend who was forced into wearing an embarrassingly emasculating outfit as part of a couple’s costume their significant other demanded they wear together.  Just look into those M&M’s eyes, they’re practically screaming, “I know bro, but if I hadn’t worn this tonight I’d have never heard the end of it.  Let’s just drink some beers and pray for the party to be over so we can take these damn things off.”

Cherry Cordial M&M’s

What percentage of Americans out there actually like cherry cordials?  Has to be less than 25%, right?  Next to the coconut, what part of every box of chocolate gets thrown out more than cherry cordials?  It’s like someone couldn’t decide between making a chocolate candy or a gusher, so they just shrugged and went with “something that, when you bite into it, resembles an alien birth scene in a 80’s sci-fi film.”  Seriously, just look at their Wikipedia page, it’s pretty much a picture of a Klingon’s afterbirth and a three sentence article written by someone who didn’t want to spend more than 30 seconds of their life having to think about cordials ever again.

The only thing we can think of worse than these gooey, liquid-bathed, overly sweet cherry entombed in a thin membrane of chocolate waiting to spill its contents all over your shirt the moment your tooth taps it would be a goddamn M&M that tried to replicate that taste and sensation.  But lucky you, it’s fucking Christmas, and there’s no better way to get back at your aunt for sending over another goddamn fruitcake than this season M&M flavor that they bring back year after year because each year the Mars Corporation sends out Christmas cards that just say, “You can go kiss our holly jolly asses, here’s some chocolate that tastes like month-old prison wine.”

White Chocolate Candy Corn M&M’s

The red M&M is not amused, partly because he looks like one of the Coneheads after a tanning salon mishap, but mainly because he has been transformed from “delicious coated buds of chocolate” to “white chocolate sacrilegiously altered to taste like waxed sugar cane sap.”  It’s really not a good sign when the packaging of your product has your mascot looking out at your customer with a contemptuous look that says, “You have to be fucking kidding me, right?”  For reasons that confound industry experts and appreciators of general human decency, you can still buy these, though the voices inside your head screaming, “NO DON’T EAT THESE THEY SOUND DISGUSTING” pretty much matches up with many of the reviews the product has gotten.  Just do yourself a favor.  If you ever find yourself in a Wal-Mart, and these M&M’s have mysteriously shown up on a shelf, when you think to yourself, “Maybe I should just buy this and try it as a joke” take a pause, and look at the M&M.  He is judging you.

Pumpkin Spice M&M’s

Much like the last entry, you can tell a lot about an M&M flavor by the look on the wrapper M&M’s face.  The difference between this guy and the candy corn M&M is that the poor guy on the pumpkin spice label looks like he just saw something that put the fear of God in him, and that something is the fact that there is such a thing as pumpkin spice M&M’s.  If you purchased a pumpkin spice M&M, you were greeted with this little guy just saying, “Oh God.  What have you done?”

You got some gross ass fucking M&M’s is what you did, because for some reason you’ve decided that, since it’s autumn, between the pumpkin beer and pumpkin spice lattes and, God help you, pumpkin Pringles, you didn’t have enough artificial pumpkin flavor in your life, so you might as well ruin your childhood by taking one of your favorite candies and subjecting it to such cruel treatment.  And it was cruel treatment.  Just look at this poor fella.  Why did you do that to him?  Why did you hurt the M&M?  Why do you only do this to the ones you love?

Just remember, America, it’s all okay.  Eventually it will all be okay.  Just sit down, get a normal bag of M&M’s (or hell, go crazy and get almond M&M’s) and just eat until you forget that these products exist.  It should take about three bags.  Hope you have a glass of milk handy.  You’ll thank us later.