Where Are All The Lemon Jolly Ranchers?

Few hard candy brands are more universally beloved than Jolly Rancher. You may have a soft spot for Werther's Originals because of your grandparents, but Jolly Rancher broke the mold on flavor variety and intensity. That's why many '90s kids foster especially strong nostalgia for them. The good news is that Jolly Ranchers are still around today, but the bad news is that one of the best Jolly Rancher flavors (which is also among the most popular) isn't quite so readily available. That flavor? Lemon.

Somewhere along the way, it seems the brand lost sight of the lemon flavor. The only way to actually find this flavor of Jolly Ranchers these days is to find a pack of Jolly Rancher Fruity Bash. Plenty of lemon JR enthusiasts have taken to social media to decry this and seek help tracking the flavor down. Although Jolly Rancher started as an ice cream store, the company changed hands over the years before finally landing under the Hershey's umbrella in 1996.

Under The Hershey Company, bags of Jolly Rancher hard candies really exploded in both availability and popularity. Folks couldn't get enough of flavors like watermelon, cherry, green apple, and, yes, especially lemon. But in 2011, JR unveiled blue raspberry and removed lemon from bags to make room for the new flavor. Fans expressed their frustration, and the brand answered with a glorious lemon-only bag in 2013, but those didn't stick around long.

Although they haven't been around for a while, fans still crave the lemon Jolly Rancher. "They wanna rip the best flavors of candy out of our mouths," bemoaned one Reddit user. "These were superior to regular Jolly Ranchers, even the tropical ones." In fact, plenty of folks online agree that lemon is the best Jolly Rancher flavor hands down. But what adds insult to injury is that it was blue raspberry that stole lemon's place. Another user on Reddit deemed this "arguably the worst mistake they made."

Not everyone considers blue raspberry the worst Jolly Rancher flavor, but many prefer the more authentic fruit taste of something like lemon. Blue raspberry is a lab-concocted flavor that was used by a company called Gold Medal in 1958 to sell raspberry sno-cones and cotton candy. They stood out from all the other red flavors already available like cherry, strawberry, and watermelon. When the ICEE slushie made its flavor a split of cherry and blue raspberry in the 1970s, the faux fruit really soared in demand.

So, it's not shocking that Jolly Rancher thought blue raspberry would be a hit — and it's not like it wasn't. It's that maybe the brand shouldn't have nixed lemon to make room for it. Of course, you can track those Fruity Bash bags of Jolly Ranchers down on sites like Walmart to still get lemon Ranchers today, but you may want to savor every lemon candy as these bags aren't always easy to find.