Japanese Soda Candy #1: There's a lot of them

One of the most common candies I see when I walk in a Japanese market is soda candy. With so many different ones, it's hard to figure out which ones taste good and which ones are just okay. Well I buy a lot of soda candy and I figured it was time to start writing about my experiences with them. Here is the first installment of Japanese Soda Candy.


I have no idea what the name of the candy is. On the top it has "something & something". I'm going to assume that the brown and blue bottles are adventurers or something. I know that the brown and the blue bottles are welcoming buyers. Look at the brown bottle, it's licking its lips. It knows it's delicious. The green bottle in the top left is totally spacing out and thinking about something else. It's a good thing they put the blue and brown bottles on the front.

There are so many question marks on the back, I can only conclude that even the makers of this candy were confused.

Each candy comes individually wrapped and has a little character on the wrapper.

A picture of the candies unwrapped. They have little faces or something on them, except for the brown bottle. The brown bottle looks like a barrel or something.

On the outside you have a hard candy. Once you get to the core there is baking soda which gives the soda candy its fizz. Some soda candies are fizzy all the way through, but some, like this one, require you to get to the core before anything happens. I had no idea what the flavors were, so much of this will be based on assumptions. Here is a ranking of the flavors:

1. Green: This tastes like blue soda candy you would find in other Japanese soda candy bags. I'm not quite sure on how to describe the taste. It's somewhat like Ramune. Anyway, I enjoyed this flavor the most simply because the blue candies in other Japanese soda candies are my favorite.

2. Pink: The best way to describe it is citrus-like. It gives off a sort of lemon, grapefruit, and orange flavor. I found this one to be quite good and it was a flavor where even though I couldn't really tell what it was, I had a general idea of what they were aiming for.

3. Brown: This is your standard cola flavored candy. This is a hit with my female students, I don't know why they love cola flavored candies so much. Nothing really special here, but it was good enough to make third.

4. Yellow: This had a grapefruit flavor. I don't know what they were aiming for, but grapefruit is the impression that I got. It's a bit harsher than the pink bottle. This was just okay and I'd much rather have the other three candies over this one.

5 & 6 Blue and Purple: Okay, these are in this category simply because I didn't know what flavor they were and I didn't enjoy them that much. If someone could translate the bag, that would be great, otherwise I'm not sure what flavor they are. Purple sort of reminded me of Watermelon Warheads. I hate Watermelon Warheads. It's not that Watermelon Warheads are terrible, it's just that every other flavor of Warhead is so much better. I'm not even going to try and guess what Blue was.

Finally, I took my camera and decided to use it like a hammer to break open a candy to show the core:

Yep, that's what makes the candy fizz when you get to the middle. This is also how the Japanese import crack cocaine into Japan (I don't know if they actually do this or not, wouldn't it be crazy if it were true though?)

While a solid candy with six different flavors, I couldn't tell what some of them were. I think I'm more partial to soda candies that are fizzy all the way through as opposed to these ones where the ingredients that give the fizz are in the middle. This soda candy wasn't my favorite, but the students ravaged it nonetheless. In fact, I had to hide this last bag so that I could even do a review on it. It's probably because of the characters on the front. The better looking the bag, the more likely it is that kids will fawn over it. Hopefully, I will be able to do more reviews on Japanese soda candies before my students get to them.