What Flavor Are Candy Circus Peanuts, Anyway?

For most trick-or-treaters, rodeo fans, and general candy enthusiasts, circus peanuts rank somewhere between raisins and candy corn on the list of sweets to skip. The orange, spongey, legume doppelgänger is so famously disliked that it shares a divisive icon status with black licorice, pineapple pizza, and love-it-or-hate-it cilantro. But, while almost anybody could identify those other three items in a blind taste test, circus peanuts are more mysterious.

Circus peanuts have been made by a variety of different companies over the last couple hundred years, so their packaging has varied. But neither the jaunty, crooked smile covering a bag of Brach's circus peanuts, nor the unsettling clown floating across the Spangler version betray the true flavor inside: Artificial banana.

This reveal will leave anyone who's actually had a circus peanut remarking, "Sure, why not?" And anyone who's ever had a banana wouldn't be wrong to dispute the circus peanut's purported fruit flavor. But Brach's, Spangler, and a few others have asserted banana as the taste that most people will narrowly be able to identify.

There are plenty of classic foods that incorporate, feature, or are based wholly on peanuts. Though they likely came later than circus peanuts, peanut brittle also emerged in the 1800s and remains a pop culture touchpoint today. In the century that followed, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich earned an unshakable place in American history. Peanuts have proven to be a palate pleaser time and time again. So, circus peanuts' curious banana flavor is certainly not due to disinterest in the humble crop. But sadly, mere theories stop short of revealing a real answer.   

In 1999, Brach's director of research, John Flanyak, told The Wall Street Journal about a hypothesis that banana flavoring was simply less expensive than peanut flavoring at the time of circus peanuts' inception. And, in his book "Andrew Zimmern's Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, & Wonderful Foods," the celebrity chef posited that the unexpected flavor might have been the result of a banana oil-related mistake. Though they're both reasonable assumptions, they do not move the world any closer to the truth about this candy.