Meiji Gummy Choco Candy

Nuts, corn flakes, bananas, wafers, rice puffs and crisps, potato chips, coffee beans, and grasshoppers. No, this is not a game of "one of these things is not like the other". These things are actually all alike in a particular way. All of them, including the grasshoppers, can be purchased in chocolate-covered fashion. I thought about all of the things which you can buy covered in chocolate which may or may not naturally seem a pairing with it when I pondered the idea of chocolate-covered gummy candy.

Today's reviewable comes to you (and me) courtesy of CandyWarehouse at which you can not only buy the chocolate-covered gummy candy, but also a variety pack of insects enrobed in thick chocolatey goodness. The notion does bring to mind the "crunchy frog" sketch in Monty Python, but it may seem far less alien in the future than it does now as I hear that we may have to utilize insects for protein when civilization falls in the next 50 years or so. When that time comes, you'll think that chocolate-covered gummy will be a gourmet memory and in no way inferior to any of the other more common suspects.

This isn't chocolate in the conventional sense as it's not the brown stuff, but rather fruit-flavored white chocolate. The three flavors are strawberry, muscat, and orange. The first and last seemed rather promising as those flavors pair well with conventional chocolate, but I was dubious of the muscat flavor.

After opening the tube, I was hit with an intense fruity smell. It was surprisingly strong. After sampling each flavor, I discovered why. Each of them tastes like a child's bubblegum flavor infused into white chocolate. It is too intense and fake-tasting. The weird thing is that fruit juice concentrates as well as various fruit liquors are used to flavor these. The flavors come from real sources, but it's all a bit too intense for my tastes.

Of the three, the one that was the least palatable was the muscat. I know muscat isn't the same as grapes, but they are similar. Chocolate-covered raisins work, but have you ever seen or tried a fresh grape as part of a chocolate fondue? I'm guessing not and for good reason. The two flavors just did not mesh.

The strawberry was intense at first and ended with a strong white chocolate sweetness. It worked okay, but it was like two flavor blasts and neither was particularly tasty. On the bright side, the textural contrast of the soft, creamy chocolate and the chewy gummy was pleasant.

Orange is the flavor that I would expect the most from, but it also was far too strong. It reminded me of flavor-blasted baby aspirin. I guess that all of that fruit flavor really is packed in there.

I admire the effort put into these, and the truth is that my husband liked them. He said that the flavor really got more intense once all of the chocolate melted away, but he still liked it. I wouldn't say he loved it, and I don't think he'd go out of his way to get them again, but he will finish the tube. As for me though, I'm not going to eat more of them so that's an "unhappy" rating is for me and a "happy" one for him. He said he likes the taste and the overall experience are good for him, which is weird because he generally dislikes gummy candy of any sort. I actually like gummy candy and even have experience with chocolate-covered gummy (via Tirol's "mochi" chocolates which are actually gummy).

So, the bottom line is that how you'll feel about this is going to vary based on your tastes. I'm going to give it the two ratings it deserves.

For me:

For my husband:

 

Meiji Mango Chocolate

This is a chocolate party that I am more than fashionably late in attending. In fact, I'd say I'm showing up just about as the hostess is clearing away the dishes and shooing out the final round of guests. The fact that I waited so long to pick up a bar of this chocolate is a reflection of how many other things were more interesting than this rather than a lack of desire to try it. The fact of the matter is that fruit-flavored chocolate is very common in Japan and if I sampled every one of them, I'd have time to write about little else.

All of that being said, mango isn't the most common of such pairings, though mango is currently the fruit-flavored darling of Japan. Dried mango was talked about for its health benefits a year or two ago (I can't keep track of when these food fads start, I've got blog posts to write!) and since then you see mango everywhere and in everything. One thing I can definitely say about Japan is that where the media leads, the people follow with a vengeance. Someone once said eating bananas in the morning would help you lose weight and there wasn't a banana to be found for awhile. I still know women who eat a banana every morning for breakfast based on this (mistaken) notion.

Getting back to mango, and this chocolate in particular. It is a thin layer of mango-flavored chocolate in the center sandwiched between two milk chocolate layers. The mango flavor is very strong and on the sweeter side. The chocolate is fairly overpowered and doesn't really have a strong effect on the overall taste. I wonder if its main effect is to mitigate some of the cloying nature of white chocolate based fruit flavoring rather than to mix and pair with the mango.

All of that in no way says this is bad. It's actually pretty tasty. I think it could have been a little better had the chocolate played a bigger role (or have been a bit darker), but it's still good. I wouldn't say I'm over the moon about it, but I am enjoying slowly eating the bar one or two squares at a time. This is definitely not the sort of thing you're going to wolf down all at one go though. If you're a mango fan, this is worth a try, but perhaps not something worth tracking down at all costs.

Tarami White Jelly

I keep talking about summer in my reviews, but with people melting onto the pavement and sweating in the intense humidity of the rainy season, and the various food companies pandering to all of us, how can I ignore the fact that the heat drives snack product introductions. That means less chocolate, more lighter, fruitier options, and especially more things that go down smooth and easy from the refrigerator case. That leads me to "jellies" (or, as we call them in the U.S., gelatin). There has been an explosion in the number of individually packaged gelatin options and most of them are pretty mundane fruit options. This "white jelly" caught my eye, because I don't know what "white" tastes like. That phrase could really be taken the wrong way...

I found this for 178 yen ($2.28) at Family Mart for 290 grams (10 oz.). That's on the expensive side, but it is a pretty large portion size. This is zero calorie jelly and I'm guessing the large amount is to fill a belly that wants to be full without any risk of weight gain. There are more and more of these products in Japan all of the time as the quest for an alien body image has spread here from the West to the East.

The company that makes this, Tarami, specializes in making a wide variety of gelatin desserts. Their main business is doing the kind with sugar based on fruit and real fruit flavors. Their zero calorie lines are split into two sizes with the smaller ones being fruit flavors and the bigger ones adding more esoteric varieties like cola and "white" to the line up. Their web site shows farms and lots of orange trees, but somehow I doubt their 400 or so employees are working the farms to fortify their gelatin desserts.

As for what "white" tastes like? It tastes like a sweet, slightly fruity Asian fruit cocktail and is somewhat yogurt-like. It's both a little tart and sour, but the flavor is on the mild side with no overwhelming sweetness. Since I'm accustomed to artificial sweeteners, this didn't bother me. In fact, I'm nearly immune to the chemical cocktails (Acesulfame K, Sucralose, Aspartame) that are used to formulate diet foods.

The part where this shines is in the texture. It's a cool, soft and slick jelly with chewy bits of nata de coco in the bottom. The textural variation that comes from the nata de coco is quite welcome and lends the illusion that you're eating something with a bit of substance. I should note that many Japanese gelatins like this include blocks of konnyaku jelly or nata de coco.

I liked this just fine, but I wasn't mad about it. The truth is that I can make more flavorful zero calorie jelly myself using plain gelatin, packets of artificial sweetener and whatever flavoring agent I want (coffee, tea, lemon, lime, etc.). That doesn't mean I couldn't see myself buying this again and it was perfectly pleasant. However, I'd only purchase it under the most unique circumstances because the size is bigger than I need and the price higher than I'd prefer to pay. Chances are, I'll never sample it again.

Just a gentle reminder that there is a contest running for two weeks to win a few snack and snack-related goodies. If you'd like to enter, the details are in this post.

Slim & Slim Mango and Grape "Jelly"

When I first came to Japan, diet foods were pretty much nonexistent. There were pleasantly chubby Japanese girls, but they were seen as "healthy", not "fat". In the past decade and a half, diet foods and focusing on weight loss has grown exponentially. You see more products with "Zero" on them every year.

Part of me is sad about this because I think that it reflects diet obsession, which is never a good thing. Part of me is glad because I am a willing consumer of such foods. Of course, I have an excuse, I arrived in this country "pre-corrupted" by Western obsessions with dieting. Sometimes I think that the more we focus on our eating, the fatter we get, and I worry that the Japanese may eventually fall victim to the same problems as Westerners as their culture learns to promote fear of weight gain to sell products which eventually end up causing weight gain and food obsession.

Sociological issues aside, and I'm sorry to get so serious, but sometimes things take on a life of their own, I decided to finally dive in and try one of the plethora of zero calorie "jellies" (actually, it's what we call "gelatin" in the U.S.). I've seen big, single-serving size tubs of them in convenience stores and snack shops for quite some time and had passed on them. When these two varieties of smaller size jellies showed up for 89 yen (97 cents) per bag at Okashi no Machioka, I decided to dive in.

Note that I have tried regular (that is to say, sugar-filled) Japanese single serving gelatin tubs before. I wasn't a fan of them because they seemed toothachingly sweet. I can compare these sugar-free versions directly to that version. The first ingredient is Erythritol on both flavors and their respective fruit purees are the second. I don't understand how each can be zero calories and contain fruit puree, but there it is. The mango version is colored with carotene and paprika.

The mango has a pleasantly fruity smell and a nice mango flavor. It's not too strong, but it is rather sweet. It mainly lacks the citrus tones that you get with a real mango, but the flavor isn't bad at all. The grape smells like a grape lollipop and pretty much tastes like one. I think both of these would have a bit more punch with some citric acid or the equivalent.

I tried these both refrigerated and at room temperature and they're more pleasant when cold. The texture is pretty much what you'd expect for gelatin, though this is less firm and rather soft set compared to American gelatin like that you make with Jell-O mixes. Both also have a bit of liquid which tastes like juice around the outside.

These are pleasant tasting and not painfully sweet (which is better than the sugar-based jellies I tried before). They're even a little bit of a refreshing mouthful (each tub is 22 grams/.77 oz.) in hot weather when you have them cold. The thing that did surprise me though is that they tended to suppress appetite. Perhaps the gelatin is designed to achieve this effect, or it was just psychology, but I really did find that eating two of them (I tended to eat one of each flavor each time) killed my hunger for awhile.

I'd recommend buying these and putting one in your refrigerator if you're on a diet or have a tendency to eat more than you'd like. I think the mango is better than the grape, but both are fine. These aren't healthy at all since they have a chemical cocktail (Acesulfame K, Sucralose), but they seemed to serve me well when hunger struck and I either couldn't eat or didn't want to.

Poifull and Poifull Beautist Jelly Beans

If you download Meiji's English language company brochure, you'll get a good look at their effort to position themselves as a company which is trying to promote health as well as junk food. You'll also get an eyeful of their kind of scary-looking president in his profile picture. His jowls look like they're trying to force him into one of the biggest frowns I've ever seen. I don't know why Japanese men don't smile in their pictures, but I think they need a little more coaching before they position themselves as the face of their company.

The Poifull Beautist seems to be an attempt to sell jelly beans that promote health. They're fortified with vitamin C, collagen, hyaluronic acid, and ceramide. My guess is that the idea is that they will give one beautiful skin. I picked up the Beautist variety of Poifull, a 40 gram bag with 135 calories, at a local 99 yen shop ($1.07) because the silly concept caught my fancy. My husband bought the plain version of Poifull, a 53 gram box with 187 calories, at New Days for 120 yen ($1.30), not knowing I'd already bought a version of the same snack. He bought it because he rarely saw any jelly beans in Japan and wanted to sample them.


There are some flavor differences between the regular and "beautist" version. Beautist has blood orange, grape, lemon, and green apple. Regular poifull has lemon, grape, apple, and muscat. The quality of the jelly beans is very good. The flavors are all intense, somewhat sour, fairly authentic and one can be distinguished from the other easily. These are actually marketed as being akin to bontan ame, a unique jelly candy made with a Japanese citrus fruit, but they are pretty much a jelly bean.

I love the flavor of these, and one might wonder why these get an "indifferent" rating. The problem is that these are tiny little jelly beans. Each is about 1.2 cm x .6 cm (.47 in. x .24 in.) in size. This would be fine if they were mints or Tic Tacs, but for a food that has to be chewed to be consumed, it makes it difficult to eat them without tossing 3-5 in your mouth at once. I found myself biting my cheeks while trying to eat them as single jelly beans and I wasn't keen on chewing on multiple ones at the same time.

I wouldn't buy these again mainly because I don't like the experience of chewing up the inside of my cheeks while chasing a tiny jelly bean around my mouth. I can't fault the flavors or textures of the candy itself, but the size really ruined the experience for me. Clearly, this might be a very subjective experience and I would encourage anyone who wants a high quality, not-too-sweet, and very good tasting fruit-flavored jelly bean to sample these.