I was talking to Angie Schiavoni the other day and she said something profoundly interesting:

Why don’t grape candies taste anything like grapes? Fruit flavoring tastes really nothing like the fruit … strawberry/cherry/watermelon/grape/peach/pineapple/etc flavoring is totally different from the real thing.

Isn’t this weird? Even more odd … why have I never thought of this before?

Even more odd:
Every candy seems to use the exact-tasting fruit flavors. Eat one strawberry candy and it will taste almost identical to another strawberry candy — even though they are from very different brands and even though neither of them actually taste the same as a strawberry. (and I love both real strawberries and strawberry candies)

And the flavors are totally arbitrary. Angie pointed out that if the initial Wizard who created these flavors switched the strawberry and cherry flavoring, we’d would have probably conformed to the flavors in the same way. But now, many years later, we’d all freak-out if the powers that be suddenly switched the cherry and strawberry flavors. “That’s NOT a cherry candy, it is strawberry,” we’d say. And we’d be right.