When it comes to licorice, which has the best: Twizzlers or Red Vines? Both are established licorice icons. Both have gained fame over the years, with Twizzlers being served at many movie outlets, while Red Vines made their way to one of Saturday Night Live’s most famous new sketches, “Lazy Sunday. But when it comes down to it, which one tastes the best? Let’s start off with a history lesson.
Twizzlers started off with the Y& S Company out of Pennsylvania back in the mid-1800’s. They merged with a few smaller companies and formed the National Licorice Company and didn’t change their official name to Twizzlers until 1968. Then Hershey’s bought out Twizzlers in 2005.
The Red Vines licorice is a product of the American Licorice Company, established in the 1900s out of Chicago, but moved to San Francisco. They also make Snaps, Sour Punch, and Super Rope.
So it turns out that Twizzlers vs. Red Vines is actually an East Coast-West Coast rivalry! Which gang of licorice is the best? Using the traditional Red Vines vs. Twizzler’s Strawberry Twists, I’ll compare color, taste and nutritional information since both snacks claim to be healthier snacks than, say, a fried Twinkie.
Color: Red Vines is super red. Really red. Stop light Red. They sure didn’t name it “rose vines” or “deep magenta vines”. You know you’re getting some serious cherry or strawberry flavor when you look at the Red Vines package.
Twizzlers, however, aren’t so exciting with the color. Sure, it’s reddish and strawberry-looking, but nothing intimidating. The color looks like a deep thigh bruise to me. Maybe their leaning towards seductive rather than in-your-face excitement. Who knows what those research and development guys are up to back there in the lab?
Nutrition: It’s a toss-up to say these snacks are healthy, but compared to most other snacks that stand next to them in a movie theatre (Giant-sized Snickers, Whoppers to name a couple), these snacks-when you actually eat the serving size-aren’t too shabby for you. Red Vines boasts nine vines per serving, handing you only 200 calories, but there are 46 grams of carbs and 29 grams of sugar to go along with it. If that’s all the sugar and carbs you eat that day, you should be ok. And nine vines is a lot.
Twizzlers’ serving size is three pieces, but they are longer than Red Vines pieces. For their serving size, Twizzlers hits you up for 130 calories, 30 carbs, and 18 grams of sugar. Not to bad for a snack. But who eats three Twizzlers? If you are looking for the healthier snack, Twizzlers is probably the better choice.
Taste: I prefer Twizzlers Strawberry over Red Vines hands down. Red Vines tastes like Red dye to me. It’s almost powdery; especially if you eat out of that giant jug of Red Vines you can buy at Sam’s Club. Yechh. Listen, I tried to enjoy them without the Mr. Pibb. I ate them several times. After about the 4th try on Red Vines, I decided that my stomach couldn’t possibly handle any more of that Red 40 dye. The Strawberry Twizzlers are like that hot librarian girl back in the college days. You realized at first she was attractive, but once you spoke to her and looked dead into her eyes, you saw a definite seductress hiding underneath those glasses (I ended up marrying her, by the way). Twizzlers are just like that. Once you have a taste of them, your stomach seems limitless on how many you can handle. It’s just enough sugar and strawberry to say “hey, I need more of THAT!
The east coast wins this war for me. Twizzlers are the tastier product and the healthier one- if you stop at the serving size.
