Belly Flops

Did you know that Jelly Belly saves up their gourmet-jelly-bean rejects, packages them up under the name "Belly Flops," and then sells them at a steep discount from the usual price?

They have the same awesome Jelly Belly flavors, but instead of being the perfect little beans one expects from Jelly Belly, they are imperfect in one of many ways. Some of them are "compound beans," made up of a lot of beans that came off the line fused together. Some are too small, or have a shape that deviates too much from the Jelly Belly standard. Others have serious gaps in their coating. Like Quasimodo, abandoned to the bell tower of Notre Dame because of his hideous face and hump, these beans have been cast from the gourmet shops solely because of their looks.

But regardless of how ugly they look, they're still genuine Jelly Belly jelly beans, with their well-deserved reputation for creative and delicious flavors.  Also, the "fun factor" of having weird and unusual shapes should not be overlooked. When we were kids, my sibs and I would seek out "doubles" and other deformed pieces in a bag of jelly beans - the unique, nonbean shapes were highly prized because they so rarely slipped past the factory's quality control measures.  We imagined that they tasted even better than their conformist cousins in the bag. We would have had a great time with a bag of Belly Flops.