I have very mixed feelings about this Special Edition flavor of M&Ms.  I guess on balance, I'm just glad it's a special edition and not a real thing.

On the one hand, I applaud companies for mixing things up.  I'm not one of those people who get upset when a company ventures away from its usual products and tries something new.  I'm always curious about new candy, and new forms of old standards.  It's fun!  And sometimes they're really good.  

I rarely go crazy over a new M&M flavor.  Peanut Butter M&Ms won my heart, all those years ago.  After that was a long drought before the new Star Wars movies brought us the amazing (and sadly short-lived) delicacy of Dark Chocolate M&Ms.  At one point I bought extra bags and sold them on eBay for twice what I'd paid for them, they were that popular.  When they were pulled from the shelves I phoned all around town looking for the last remnants, but they must have been shipped en masse back to the factory for remaindering.

When they came back as a semi-regular flavor, I cheered!

And then there's the coconut M&Ms that I tried recently.  Meh.  I liked the pretzel ones better, but still not enough to buy them again.

So which camp would this flavor fall into?  It's meant to invoke the experience of eating a PBJ sandwich.  Although wrapped inside an M&M candy shell, obviously.  Which makes less sense the more you think about it, so I recommend we just move on before we get too confused.

My first impression is that these candies are really unattractive.  They come in three colors: red, yellow, and brown.  The red ones look fine, I suppose, although it's sort of a sullen shade of red.  

The dark brown ones have a strange mottled appearance, as if they had suffered some kind of Death Of A Thousand Pecks.  Extremely close examination shows that the lighter marks are actually tiny flecks of what looks like a controlled bloom.  I don't know.  I have no idea what the deal is with the color on the dark brown ones.  It kind of weirds me out.  

The yellow ones are just appalling.  The shade of yellow could charitably be described as "mustard."  They are flecked with red.  It is revolting.  Possibly the worst, most ill-conceived color scheme I have ever seen on a candy.  

I have to assume that the yellow ones are meant to be peanut butter colored.  I find this puzzling, because they are clearly a mustard yellow, and peanut butter is tan.  Why not make them tan?  Why the horrible mustard color?  WHY.

When you first bite in, you get a strong burst of strawberry.  The flavor quickly fades, leaving you with the standard M&M peanut butter.  I liked the strawberry flavor well enough, as a nice light addition to the flavor.  But an odd effect is that the more of these you eat, the less you taste the strawberry.  That's hardly the best marketing tagline, but there you have it.