Halal-friendly jellies - Tesco

Welcome back to my little Halal Food Guide! As I mentioned in the previous post of the series, I'm trying to take the blog back to its basics and explore more about halal-friendly food choices. I'm currently focusing on sweets and jellies, and last time I looked at Sainsbury's offering. Next up: Tesco.

 

The nearest Tesco to us is an Extra store, so I was hoping for a good selection. Well, can't say I was that impressed - same standard choice as everywhere, and boo-hoo the strawberry pencils have gelatine in them! Let's have a look at what we CAN have then - again, I've only picked from the jellies and other soft sweets that need a gelling agent.

1. Mini Jelly Beans - Really glad to see those with a V symbol, they are always popular with the kids. I mentioned last time about the shellac that's used in some brands of jelly beans, and that I try to avoid it as doubtful, so these are just a safe option to pick up.

 

2. Strawberry/cola/bubblegum lances - Pretty standard offering, so far they seem to be veggie in all the shops I've gotten them from. The bubblegum flavour was something new for us though, it was great to see a different one to the usual choice of strawberry and cola.

3. Milk bottles - These were a bit of a surprise. While getting the stuff for these posts I go through every single kind of sweets on the shelf looking at ingredients, even if I might've seen the same sweet in another shop and I know it would usually contain gelatine. We really liked these, they taste like sweet cream and have a good texture - sometimes veggie jellies aren't as nice as those with animal gelatine, because of different gelling agents used the textures can be a bit off, but these were pretty good.

 

4. Fizzy Multicoloured Belts - Another pretty standard one across all the shops.

 

5. Strawberry Laces - Or "jelly spaghetti" as my kids call them. Another one that's usually veggie across the shops.

 

This was all that I found in Tesco (from their own brand) that was halal-friendly - kind of expected more, as their own brand sweets selection was quite big, but that's always something and we did get couple of new things 👍