I know what you’re thinking.. Tic Tacs on Cheap Eats? Candy doesn’t get featured much here because a lot of candy just plain expensive and many would argue plain unnecessary. Halloween aside, do we really need candy? Save a couple bucks and save your teeth, right?

Well, the other day I was at the local Dollar Tree. I have been meaning to make a huge run on all the scary looking dollar food items there and review them. Their food aisle is crazy… cans of spaghettios hiding amidst bottles of olives and tubs of Adkins friendly soup. I decided to start off slowly with something relatively safe. These Lime Tic-Tacs fit the bill, because they were 3 for a dollar (I can’t remember the last time that I saw packages of mints for 33 cents).

You will notice that there is only one box left of the 3. That’s because the lime tic-tacs were so good I consumed the other two containers in less than a day. And me, not being a sweets person!

I have childhood memories of sort of gross tasting tic-tacs, I believe it was the peppermint kind. It just didn’t do it for me. Truthfully, I was buying the tic-tacs for the nifty plastic packaging box. They didn’t have fruit tic-tacs like today, which I feel are the best ones because they are really nice and tangy. I usually get the orange or lime, though I’ve been known to deviate and go for cinnamon or spearmint.

What I like about tic-tacs, besides the cool box that you can use to store small items in, is that they are like the perfect size. I don’t care much about the fact that each tic tac only has 2 calories. I just like the size and shape of the nuggets for some reason. The taste is also interesting because there’s that outer smooth candy shell, but you can bite down into it pretty easy. I feel like they aren’t as powdery as some other mints.

One downside that I have heard people complain about is that tic-tacs, especially my favorite fruit ones, don’t really seem to do any amount of significant breath freshening. I think this is true… though I think of them more as candy than mints. But I’d guess that the mint flavors of tic-tacs work better than the fruit kinds.

I thought a dollar for 3 of them was pretty good. I think they are normally about 50 to 70 cents? One of my old standby mints for actual breath freshening is the circular plastic cans of Icebreakers which are extremely expensive, sometimes more than $2. I have to wait until they are on sale. I have been trying to find these buggers in bulk (I forget if Costco has tubs of mints like this?) … I think the marketers are smart enough not to offer a huge tub of mints in bulk and let you refill your own tins. They want you to pay for the small packaging over and over again, wasteful. It’s all about the packaging. Though I think one of these companies should try it out, because I’d definitely buy a lot of bulk mints.

Till then, these 3 packs of tic-tacs fit my fancy. Even if they aren’t really mints.

Cheap Eats Score: 6/10

www.tictacusa.com