This season, we're tasting all the Thanksgiving-themed food we can find. Now let's gobble gobble.
5 ‘Thanksgiving’-Flavored Foods, Ranked
Published on Oct. 31, 2024
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5. Lester’s Fixins Pumpkin Pie Soda
The novelty soda brand Lester’s Fixins has no shortage of odd flavors: Bacon, Peanut Butter & Jelly and Buffalo Wing are some of the quirky sips sold in 12-ounce glass bottles. The Pumpkin Pie flavor doesn’t taste nearly as unpleasant as I was bracing for, and it’s significantly more like pumpkin pie than Jelly Belly’s attempt (more on that later). Each sip offers prominent cinnamon notes, and the pure cane sugar from which the soda is made suggests something baked at home from scratch—at least as much as a bright orange soft drink can possibly suggest that. This sits last because it’s the last thing I’d reach for a second time, but I have no ill will toward Lester or his fixins.
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4. Jelly Belly Holiday Favorites Jelly Beans
If any brand was going to release a package full of cacophonous seasonal flavors, it’s Jelly Belly, which has dedicated an entire segment of its business to tricking us into eating confounding beans. By contrast, this Holiday Favorites bag is pretty tame, containing Egg Nog, Candy Cane, Hot Chocolate, Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry Sauce flavors. For our purposes, the latter two are the Thanksgiving flavors to investigate.
The Pumpkin Pie candy is almost laughably off-base, suggesting nothing close to pumpkin or, indeed, any other particular flavor. It’s flatly syrupy and tastes more like Circus Peanuts than anything else. The Cranberry Sauce jelly bean, though, is unquestionably the best Jelly Belly bean I have ever eaten. It’s immediately assertive, and while it tastes more sweet than tart, it has a deep fruity flavor with none of the typical sickly sweet aftertaste of other jelly beans. Jelly Belly, if you’re willing to sell me a 5-lb. sack of Cranberry Sauce beans, name your price.
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3. Good & Gather Harvest Stuffing Flavored Popcorn
Target’s house brand loves to lean into seasonal flavors. This bag of ready-to-eat Good & Gather popcorn is dusted with “stuffing” seasoning, aka a blend of sugar, spices, molasses powder, onion powder, salt and yeast. On first bite, it’s not evident that the seasoning is meant to be Thanksgiving-adjacent, but after several fistfuls of the stuff, those savory notes establish themselves a little more and evoke the holiday flavors in a fun new way. Unfortunately, each piece of popcorn is so lightly dusted that you wouldn’t know it’s seasoned at all on first glance. I’d like a more liberal dusting of Thanksgiving flavor.
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2. DiGiorno Thanksgiving Pizza
It’s not delivery, it’s a holiday stunt! DiGiorno is back for the second year in a row with its high-profile Thanksgiving Pizza, a Detroit-style crust heaped with roasted turkey slices, gravy, cranberries, sweet potatoes, green beans, crispy onions, cheddar and mozzarella. It’s exhausting to look at, but as it bakes in the oven, everything comes together like a symphony.
Thanks to a special baking pan, the crust achieves both the crispy bottom and crunchy cooked-cheese edges of a true Detroit-style pizza, creating the perfect foundation for what surely is at least three gallons of gravy. Far from being excessive, all that gravy makes every other element makes sense, and prevents the thick crust from tasting dry and bready. The green beans maintain a fresh snap, and the cranberries, which I would have loved a few more of, are nice bursts of tartness in each slice. This is just an overall fun eating experience, and while other brands have released stunty products in recent years, this one is actually calibrated toward maximum deliciousness. I would bring this to Friendsgiving in a heartbeat.
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1. Capriotti’s ‘The Bobbie’ Sandwich
This is one of the more popular iterations of those “Thanksgiving” sandwiches you see at chains this time of year. The Bobbie layers roasted pulled turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and mayo to create what Capriotti’s calls “a Thanksgiving feast in every bite!” The shredded turkey, on its own, veers on the dry side, but the stuffing had a bit of moistness, helped along by both the mayo and a generous slathering of cranberry sauce, which kept everything together.
The seasonal flavors were well balanced, and while this sandwich could have used slightly more of an umami element to bring out the truest Thanksgiving flavor—maybe add some gravy to the mix?—this was a deeply satisfying autumnal bite.
