Meiji Coke Flavored Cotton Candy Gum

If you recall, last Summer, my friends Phil and Karina, brought me many candies from their trip to Japan. One of the candies that I was very fond of was a grape flavored cotton candy that had popping candies inside of it. Since then, I have found that there are some markets in the U.S. that carry that candy, which is still as delicious as I remember it. On the back of the package, the English label labels it as Chewing Gum. I suppose that it was easier to label it as Chewing Gum instead of Cotton Candy with Poprocks. Next to it, I also saw another candy in a similar package that was also labeled as Chewing Gum. I decided to take a risk.

Ninjas blowing a bubble and a frog. This has the makings of being a great candy. I felt the package, and it was as soft as the grape cotton candy from before, if not a bit more uniform and packaged, so I decided to give it a try. If it's endorsed by those characters up there, how could I lose?

A tuft of the cotton candy

There was no popping when I ate it, so I was a bit disappointed, but it did taste like cola, sot hat was good. However, at that point where cotton candy's supposed to melt away in your mouth, the candy began to turn into chewing gum. Eventually most of the cotton candy in my mouth turned into cola flavored chewing gum, which was delightful. I have to say, I would have liked it to have the popping candy and some more tart flavor. I think if there was some pop and a bit of sour flavor it would have put this candy over the edge. Otherwise, it's a very interesting candy, and one that my students enjoy. There aren't other candies readily available that can do this.

Meiji Coke Flavored Cotton Candy Gum: 9/10

Three on three with Phil and Karina

This is going to be another post featuring guest input from my friends. This time it is from my friends Karina and Phil, who were the ones who contributed to my Japanese Loot series of entries. The following products are Japanese, but we found them in a Korean supermarket. This supermarket had a large selection of candies, but the prices were a little bit more expensive than at a Japanese market. However, they did feature some things that I had not seen before, or things that have not returned to the shelves at Japanese markets. Anyway, the first item that we sampled was:

Blueberry Kit Kat. Meiji has a blueberry flavored chocolate bar, which is excellent as are there green tea and strawberry flavored bars. I figured that if Blueberry Kit Kat was anything similar to those, it would be worth the try.

A melted Blueberry Kit Kat. I'm going to assume that these were not the best stored candies because a majority, if not all the bars, were melted

We all agreed that this was a pretty mediocre candy. I expected a lot more, but there wasn't much flavor at all. The chocolate wasn't that good, there was a hint of blueberry, but overall it lacked flavor in general. I would recommend getting regular milk chocolate Kit Kat over this.

Blueberry Kit Kat: 6/10
Phil's input: 6 - 6.5/10
Karina's input: 6/10

The next item we tried was Mango Oreo bars. Mango and chocolate are not a combination I could have thought of. There are some fruits that pair well with chocolate, such as strawberries, but things like mangoes, oranges, or anything that you can't really imagine with chocolate never come to light, so I imagined this would be interesting

A Mango Oreo bar cut in half

The best way I can describe the way this tasted is that it's like a sub-par Chinese pineapple cake. Phil agreed with me on this and all three of us thought that this was a step down from the Blueberry Kit Kat. I expected more of a mango taste, but I suppose pineapple is the closest Oreo could get. It lacked even more flavor than the Blueberry Kit Kat and was extremely average

Mango Oreo Bar: 5/10
Phil's input: 5 - 5.5/10
Karina's input: 5/10

Lion Cola Candy was the last candy we tried and I figured that it was a safe bet. Cola candies are generally quite good when they have a fizz to them. The only time I could imagine a cola flavored candy being good without having some sort of fizz is with Haribo Cola Gummies

Lion Cola Candy from another angle

This was definitely the winner of the items we tried. It had lots of flavor, most importantly a lot of cola flavor, and it had a nice fizz to it. We've been screwed before with other hard cola candies that didn't have fizz and just weren't good at all, but this one was very good. The only thing that I could hold against it is that I think it wasn't stored properly either, so a lot of the pieces were sticky and stuck to each other, but that's more of a storage issue than a flavor issue. We're glad we tried this last, so that we could get the flavor of the previous two candies out of our mouths.

Lion Cola Candy: 8/10
Phil's input: 8 .5/10
Karina's input: 8/10