The Meiji Creamy Marshmallow Chocolate has been around for a while in Japan, though it’s not easy to find in stores in the United States. I happened upon a display of them in Little Tokyo and got the last one on the shelf.

The first thing I have to ask about this bar is why we don’t have anything like this in the United States?

The bar is very simple, a single serving of milk chocolate in bar format with mini marshmallows dotted throughout. In North America we have plenty of options for chocolate covered single marshmallows (Rocky Road, various seasonal novelties) but nothing with this specific ratio.

The bar is nicely boxes, like many of Meiji’s other candy products. Inside the sturdy paperboard box is a mylar pouch with the bar in it. Mine was in excellent condition - no scuffs, not even broken.

The bar is thicker than the standard Meiji Milk Chocolate bar, and has lightly defined sections.

The bar has varying amounts of the little marshmallows in it. Around the edges, it was hard to find marshmallows, but deeper into the bar, they were quite dense. The marshmallows are small, about the size of a pencil eraser or a green pea.

The chocolate is not quite the same formula as the classic Milk Chocolate Meiji bar, which is too bad, because I really enjoy that bar. This bar is technically not even chocolate, as it contains some other vegetable oils in addition to cocoa butter, such as sunflower, shea nut and illpe butter. This gives the chocolate a smooth melt, but a very cool feeling on the tongue. The flavors are dominated by a dried milk dairy taste. The marshmallows are soft and bouncy, a little tacky and chewy around the edges of the bar.

My disappointment with the bar is with the chocolate itself. I was fully expecting the deep, smoky Meiji Milk Chocolate that I’ve tried before. What I got was a little less than that, and when paying the full import prices, it’s a little steep. Next time I’ll just get the milk chocolate bar and some other marshmallows and do the rest myself.

Still, there’s something to be learned here .... there’s a product out there that our confectionery giants are neglecting. (Though it could also use some little salty pretzel bits to complete it.)

Related Candies

1. Meiji Corot & CoffeeBeat
2. Campfire Mini Marshmallows
3. Meiji Milk Chocolate
4. Russell Stover Giant S’mores Bar & Mint Dream
5. Meiji Gummy Choco
6. Boyer’s Mallo Cup
7. Rocky Road

One of my favorite Japanese products are the Meiji Poilful. They’re not as easy to find in the United States as some other Japanese candies and are often quite expensive for a sugar candy. Every once in a while Meiji issues a new flavor variety. I found this Poifull Mint at the Japanese grocery store a few weeks ago. It features two flavors, Lemon and Muscat with an added dash of Mint.

These are not mere jelly beans, though they look like it. Instead they’re gummi beans. Inside the typical grainy sugar shell there’s a small gummi. Like gourmet jelly beans, the center is flavored, not just a plain sugary center.

I have to say that I find the flavors a little odd. The idea of mint and lemon is not that uncommon, though it’s something I associate with cough drops more than candy. (Though I admit that I do eat cough drops like candy sometimes.)

Lemon & Mint (yellow) starts out very tangy and zesty but the mint comes in like a strong menthol. It is absolutely like a cough drop but could probably use a little touch of honey to put it over the top. I liked the intensity of it, I was satisfied with one or two of them as the zest and menthol lingered.

Muscat & Mint (green) is much more subdued. The white grape flavor is tart and robust, with notes of grape juice and grape skin in there. The mint tastes more like mint than menthol, though still has that same cooling tingle. I still find it a strange and incongruous combination that I wouldn’t choose as a single flavor package, but I can enjoy as part of a mix.

Overall, I love how intense and authentic Meiji makes all of their fruit flavored candies, these are no exception. They’re a little fringe but make a nice change up for a little mouth freshener that’s different from Altoids. The box is nicely designed, unlike some other Meiji products where the box isn’t full, this one is and has a nice little flip top with a dispenser hole for sharing easily.

On a side note, one of the hazards of buying these import candies are the little translated labels they put on them. The box is quite small, but the label is even smaller with microprint. I had to take this photograph and then zoom in on it in order to read the label.

Related Candies

1. Meiji Corot & CoffeeBeat
2. Meiji Milk Chocolate
3. Tic Tac Pink Grapefruit
4. Meiji Poifull
5. Russell Stover Pectin Jelly Beans
6. Meiji Gummy Choco
7. Starburst and Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

Meiji is one of the major confectionery companies of Japan with recognizable brands like Yan Yan, Hello Panda, Chelsea and my favorite GummyChoco. I admire their products quite a bit, their flavors are bright and authentic and the attention to detail is excellent. Last year I reviewed their standard Meiji Milk Chocolate bar and found I really liked their intense flavor style. So I picked up this box called Meiji Corot which simply called them chocolate ball in English on the otherwise Japanese package.

Meiji also packages their candies well, but this is the first one I’ve really had an issue with. The box is large, it’s 4.25 inches high and 2.75 inches wide, that’s larger than a deck of poker cards or a box of cigarettes. Inside the box is a little mylar packet. It protects the candy well and certainly kept it fresh, but there’s only 1.48 ounces of candy in here - a standard bag of Milk Chocolate M&Ms as 1.69 ounces.

Hershey’s came out with a similar product last year, called Hershey’s Drops. They’re also big disks of solid chocolate with a light, shiny glaze to keep them from sticking together.

The chocolate balls are actually oblate spheroids - a squashed ball. The aspect ratio or flatness of the spheroid is determined by the dimensions. The major axis is 1.5 times the length as the minor axis. (They’re .75 inches across and about .5 inches thick at the center.)

The candies are 3.5 grams each, so a hefty little bite of chocolate compared to an M&M which are about .85 grams.

They’re creamy and milky with a chocolate pudding flavor to them. The dairy flavors are distinct and the chocolate is quite powerful, certainly a more dominant note. There’s a strong bitterness that I don’t think I get with most consumer milk chocolate products. It’s toasted and maybe even a little smoky with notes of plain old charcoal. I enjoy the flavor, it’s munchable with a great texture but a little more sophisticated than a standard milk chocolate candy.

The ingredients are not quite as desirable as the plain Meiji Milk Chocolate bar. This version of Meiji’s milk chocolate also contains some vegetable oil filler (though there’s also plenty of cocoa butter in there). The curious ingredient towards the end of the list was trehalose. Trehalose is a sugar, a disaccharide made of two glucose molecules. It’s only 40% as sweet as the standard sucrose (a disaccharide made of one glucose and one fructose molecule). I’m not quite sure what its purpose here is, it’s not here in great quantities, as it’s on the list after the soy lecithin (which is usually less than 2% of the overall mass of any chocolate product).

I also recently picked up some of Meiji’s 40th Anniversary editions of their popular Meiji CoffeeBeat chocolate candies. I’ve reviewed them before, but these versions were in different packaging and came in two versions - a milk and dark version.

The Milk version, in the tube, has a great sweet latte flavor to it. The coffee is quite strong and rich and the sugar and milk mixture is reminiscent of caramel. The one in the box didn’t come with any additional English descriptions but I can say that the milk flavors are downplayed at the coffee flavor is extremely strong, yet the texture is still creamy and smooth with a lingering charcoal bitterness.

I love these little nuggets. They’re about the size of a real coffee bean or an M&M and feature a solid coffee flavored chocolate core covered in a thin crunchy shell. I don’t know why we don’t have these or something like these widely available in the United States.

The Meiji CoffeeBeat keep their 9 out of 10 rating. (If they were more affordable and easier to find, they might get a 10 out of 10.)

Related Candies

1. Meiji Milk Chocolate
2. Hershey’s Drops: Milk Chocolate & Cookies n Creme
3. Meiji Poifull
4. Galaxy Minstrels
5. Meiji Gummy Choco
6. Coffee Beat
7. Dars Bitter

I couple of months ago I went on a buying spree in Little Tokyo and bought this Meiji Milk Chocolate bar. I photographed the packaged but then ate it without taking a picture of the contents. After consuming it, I thought, I should really review this.

I don’t know much about Meiji as a company. Everything I know about them is what I have experience interacting (eating) their products that I can get a hold of in the United States. I don’t know their politics, I don’t know how the Japanese regard the products and company and I don’t know anything about their history (except that they’re over 80 years old). It’s kind of a strange approach for me, as I often like to immerse myself with a lot of context when it comes to candy.

Late last year Meiji’s chocolate bar line got a new look. (Here’s what the package used to look with along with Orchid64’s review and some other more professional evaluations of the redesign.) Here’s another view of their classic-style packages.

I loved their old wrapper, but I have to say, I really dig the new one. I like the font but what I really enjoy is the bold simplicity; partly because what’s inside is simple and partly because it stands out so well amongst the very chaotic and colorful candy packaging common in Japan.

The ingredients are great: sugar, cacao mass, whole milk powder, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, artificial flavor.

The bar measures 6.25” long and 2.75” wide. There are 15 segments - five across and three down. They don’t really do much besides provide visual interest - I found the bar broke into pieces wherever it felt like, not along the supposed section dividers. Under the embossed paper sleeve the bar is wrapped in a rather thin and devilish foil. I found it difficult to get the bar out and even worse to get it back in. (Basically I just re-wrapped it the best I could and put it in a zipper plastic bag for later consumption.)

In Japan the bar is about a dollar, so it’s like the Hershey bar in that it’s widely available and cheap. (In the US I paid twice that though, $1.99 in Little Tokyo.) The bar is bigger than a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate which is 1.55 ounces and the Meiji Milk Chocolate is 2.04 ounces.

The flavor is deep and smoky. It’s much darker than ordinary milk chocolates, but also much less milky. It has charcoal and cocoa overtones, it reminds me of chocolate pudding I make at home - which is often very low in sugar and very high in chocolate (usually a mix of chocolate and cocoa). The melt is cool and exceptionally smooth - smoother and more consistent than Dove. It was actually comparable in mouthfeel to Amano’s Milk Chocolate bars. It’s thick but not sticky, silky but not greasy.

The toasty caramel and charcoal notes have a bitter aftertaste that’s quite pronounced. I enjoyed it quite a bit and found no problem eating a whole bar in one sitting. It’s not for everyone, but I applaud the good use of ingredients, fresh and unique flavor profile and decent price. The bar is extremely fatty - it clocks in at 167 calories per ounce, which is much higher than many milk chocolate bars which are known to be very sugary - but there’s also 15% of your calcium in each serving, 6% of your Vitamin C & Iron plus 2 grams of protein.

I’m willing to continue spending $2 for this bar and seeking it out in Japanese markets.

Related Candies

1. Cool Honey Altoids
2. Al Nassma Camel Milk Chocolate
3. UK vs US Cadbury Dairy Milk
4. Nestle Milk Chocolate
5. Milka Alpenmilch
6. Villars Swiss Milk Chocolate

I’m gaga for Meiji’s Gummy Choco, which are little gummi beans of various natural fruit flavors covered in milk and flavored white chocolate. But I’ve also wondered what it’d be like to just eat the gummi centers.

The gummi jellybean centers are called Poifull and are rather harder to find in the United States.

I picked up a few boxes via JBox.com and then ended up finding some more at Nijiya Market in Little Tokyo a few weeks later. The flavors vary from time to time. (Sometimes the yellow ones are pineapple as shown in this box and other times they’re lemon or white peach.)

While it’s tempting to call these jelly beans, they’re not. Jelly beans have jelly centers - that means that they’re a thickened candy syrup, usually gelled using corn starch but good quality ones use pectin, a natural fruit product. Poifull are a gummi product, so the centers are bouncy and chewy and thickened with gelatin. (So my vegetarian friends, you can’t have these.)

They come in four flavors and all are equally fresh and transcendent. The shell is light and a little grainy after chewing, it mostly seals in the soft and fresh flavors of the gummis themselves.

Pineapple - is sweet and bright but more like canned pineapple than the fresh stuff. Not quite as acidic but still quite credible.

Grape - is the darker purple color. The flavor is amazing, like a condensed droplet of concord grape juice. Vivid, sweet and tangy.

Muscat Grape - is the green one and like the grape has an authentic juice flavor. Muscat is a white grape so is often a little milder in its juice form. This one was tasty but didn’t wow me like the others by comparison.

Apple - is the lighter pink one. It’s definitely just like a fresh glass of apple juice, or actually, more like cider. Tangy and with a good touch of apple peel flavors in there.

(I had another box & can review the Lemon - is a mild and marmalade-like flavor. The sugar notes are boiled and toasted and the zest is still quite authentic but lacking most of the bitter qualities. It’s not terribly tart, but still has a nice snap.)

The flavors are much more intense than even Jelly Belly, very well rounded and of course the gummi texture makes them last longer. I didn’t find myself gulping them down like I do with some jelly candies, they’re absolutely more in the gummi style of eating for me. I’ve only found them in these small boxes (and sometimes in the tiny boxes for the Meiji Mini Mix - photo).

They’re pretty expensive since they’re an import product, but as far as I can tell they’re also all natural - so parents can feel good about a super-flavorful product that comes in small portions. They’d make a great addition to an Easter basket.

Related Candies

1. Jelly Belly Sunkist Citrus Mix
2. Kasugai Pineapple Gummy
3. Meiji Gummy Choco
4. Jelly Belly - All Natural
5. Gummi Sushi

One of the iconic candies in Japan are caramels. There are oodles of caramels available, most in the classic style of a hard, short caramel (meaning it’s rather chewy but dry).

Often they come in different flavors, but the classic caramel has endured for nearly 100 years. One line is the Meiji Dice, which are little caramels that come in pairs inside cube boxes that also double as dice.  More recently, as Meiji has acquired the Pokka Coffee company, they introduced the Pokka Coffee Caramel.

The cute packages feature half with icons of the Pokka coffee brand with their logo & seal. The other half are the dice - in this case using little coffee beans on each side to mark the numbers.

The caramels are bigger than the Morinaga ones I’ve had before, or the other, similar Meiji cubes.

They’re about 5/8 of an inch square with a distinct checkerboard texture on them. Each pair is wrapped in waxed paper and tucked into a box. So there are eight caramels total.

They smell very sweet and a lot like dark roasted coffee or espresso. There’s very little milk taste to it, though milk is a major ingredient. It’s definitely a sweet black coffee flavor. (Some coffee caramels taste like coffee ice cream.) I liked it much better than the grainy & gone texture of the Chewy Coffee Rio.

The dark, rich flavor and the soft, ample chew was really appealing to me. I found I ate three of the boxes before I was even ready to do this review. They were a bit on the expensive side for a mass-manufactured candy ... and the overpackaging is sweet for the first day or so, but silly and wasteful after that. I’ll likely stick with the Morinaga Caramels I know and love so well, or perhaps try the Meiji Chelsea Coffee if I can find them.

Related Candies

1. Beechies Force Chewy Candy
2. Coffee Nips
3. Japanese Black Sugar & Tropical Chews
4. The Candy Dump 2008
5. Coffee Beat
6. Green and Black Caramels

Flavored white chocolate is kind of a strange thing, not something I cared much for as a kid, but as an adult I’m warming up to it. Perhaps because there are some really good options out there.

Meiji, one of Japan’s major candy & snack companies uses white and flavored white chocolates in many of their confections. The flavors range from berry and flower flavors (sakura) to green tea and caramel.

I found this Meiji Rich Strawberry Chocolate bar in Little Tokyo at Murukai Market, but every store seemed to carry them.

The bar is much deeper in color than the KitKats or even the limited edition Hershey’s flavored white chocolate bars that I’ve had. And the intensity of the color matches the flavor. It’s much more in the berry range than the “light touch of berries”. It’s both tangy and sweet, with that woodsy flavor of seeds in there as well.

I wasn’t as fond of it as a I’d hoped. Something about the tangy mixed with the sweetness and a bit of grain from the real berry in there made me miss the cocoa butter and milk base. But for $1.29, it was a great buy for a little more exotic taste than the ordinary.

Rating: 6 out of 10

For Licorice Fans, the Klene Krokantjes are all licorice, but three different “jelly bean” style varieties in one bag.

I wasn’t sure what these would be, I thought something like the Skoolkrijt that I’ve come to love. I assumed it was a licorice center with a candy coating. I found a description online that said, “Salty Salmiak & Mint Flavor with a crunchy outer shell” which didn’t really capture it all (except that it included that it was salted licorice, not the straight sweet kind).

There are three shapes, a dark and a light jelly bean style and a larger, um, rock. I didn’t even know there was a third shape at first, as there were only two in the bag so I didn’t photograph it.

The candies look like little granite pebbles. Black and white and gray, they’re speckled and natural looking. They don’t smell like much, just a bit sweet with a slight anise note.

The beans are two different flavors. The light one is a peppermint, menthol and licorice mix of flavors. There’s a lot of crunch outside, it’s a bit grainy. The inside isn’t a molasses/wheat chewy licorice. Instead it’s a gelatin gummi flavored with licorice (and salt). The combo isn’t bad, a little metallic but the mint helps kind of smooth it all together.

The gray ones were similar but more on the straight licorice side. (They might not have been minted, but the proximity made them so.)

The lumps were a piece of the wheat based chew, again a little salted and covered with the minty crunch. That was my favorite.

They’re a little confusing for me. Not enough of one thing or another and the lack of the molasses punch to go with the licorice (my favorite combo) just didn’t make me want more and I never finished the bag.

Rating: 4 out of 10.

My favorite gum is Chiclets. They’re not easy to find but are one of the few gums that is still made with sugar and not artificial sweeteners (and no coloring either, for whatever that’s worth).

I was saddened several years ago to see that Wrigley’s altered their time-tested favorites: Wrigley’s Spearmint, Doublemint, Juicyfruit and Big Red gums to include those sorts of things. But then at Munchies in Los Angeles I stumbled across this little treasure - Juicy Fruit Gum, not only is it Kosher (which I don’t really need) but it’s also made with sugar and on top of that, they’re candy coated chicklets!

The box was cute and held 20 pellets. I usually chew three pieces at a time, so at 50 cents it’s no different in price than the regular pack.

I liked the crunch of the sugar shell and the indeterminate mellow fruity flavor of the chew. The flavor doesn’t last very long, but I don’t usually chew gum for a long time, just long enough to get most of the sugar out then I rinse and repeat.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Related Candies

1. Three Pink Bubble Gums
2. Licorice Assortment
3. KitKat Chocolatier (Strawberry & Green Tea)
4. Short & Sweet: Japanese Goodies
5. Hershey’s Raspberries ‘n’ Creme
6. Salted Licorices: Djungelvral and Dubbel Zout

This short work-week has been a bit of a round-up period, I’m doing a lot of these short reviews in long posts to try to cover a lot of the candy I have.

I first had these a couple of years ago, at a time when I was gobbling up every Japanese black sugar candy I could get my hands on. Japanese black sugar (kuro sato) traditionally comes from Okinawa and is similar to molasses or muscovado sugar.

I couldn’t resist buying a few boxes of the Morinaga Black Sugar Caramel (Kokutou) in my last order from JList, mostly because I was also ordering other black sugar items and wanted to remind myself.

They don’t look like much, but the little bullion cube sized morsels are packed with dark creamy flavor. Not too sweet and just slightly rummy at the end. They come in oodles of other flavors. I’ve tried the original Milk Caramel, Matcha, Black Sesame and Azuki, but I always come back to the Black Sugar.

Rating: 8 out of 10

While Morinaga has their line of milk caramels, Meiji has their toffee squares called Chelsea that similarly come in many varieties: Yogurt Scotch, Butterscotch, Matcha, Azuki and even mixes like Dessert.

When I saw that the Black Sugar Chelsea variety was available in the single flavor box, I jumped and ordered three packs.

The design aesthetic of the Chelsea line can’t be beat. The little box with it’s slide tray & bronzy flower design is easily distinguished from the other flavors, yet easily identified from a distance as Chelsea.

The flat pack box is easy to stash in a pocket as well, and the individual wrappers keep it all fresh.

The little foil wrappers are gold with brown and magenta flowers. I wish I was more crafty and motivated, because these would make a stellar bracelet or bag. I’m saving the wrappers, just in case.

The smooth tile of candy has no voids. Though it’s sweet, it’s pretty mellow and milky, kind of like a chai without the spice. There’s a background of woodsy flavors like brown sugar. It’s not as intensely “black sugar” as I’d like, but these are really refreshing. They don’t feel heavy and have a sort of jasmine tea finish that feels so fresh.

Chelsea also comes in bags with plastic wrapped pieces. I don’t like those as much, I really like the foil wrappers (though they’ve done a nice job of designing the sealed wraps).

Rating: 9 out of 10

Even though I already had two packs of Banana HiCHEW sitting around from a trip to Mitsuwa Marketplace earlier this year, I just had to order the Tropical Mix along with the Pineapple.

The Tropical Mix package seems to promise peach, white grape, banana and pineapple. I’d assumed that this was a mixed flavor package. But when I opened it I found that each piece was identically wrapped. Sadly (well for me and my silly expectations) it was a fruit punch and not a mixed pack. The flavor of the fruit punch is actually quite nice, I can actually detect the peachy and banana flavors in there.

My Pineapple HiCHEW were backordered (probably because I bought three packs). I was certain they were good and I wasn’t disappointed. They have a light yellow center and were extremely fresh and soft.

They start sweet then build with a tangy and kind of woodsy pine essence. The flavor lasts all the way to the end and still leaves a fresh feeling in the mouth.

Banana Rating: 7 out of 10
Tropical Rating: 6 out of 10
Pineapple Rating: 9 out of 10

I bought these on a lark. Last year I picked up something called UHA Puccho Baked Custard, which sounds dreadful but it was pretty dreamily good. Of course I wanted to buy it again and have had no luck finding it. (It probably said limited edition on the wrapper, but I don’t read Japanese.)

So when I saw this Tsubu Tsubu HiCHEW Chocolate Banana, I thought that sounded something like a custard-like chew. For $1.25 I could take a chance.

It’s a HiCHEW banana base, soft and bouncy and included in the chew are little things that look like large nonpariels (sprinkles). I guess that’s supposed to be the chocolate part. It’s not really. The crunch is nice but not as well defined as the Puccho does with their gummi & crunchy inclusions.

While I think that HiCHEW is made for people of all ages, my guess is that the Tsubu Tsubu is probably for kids and my grown-up palate just couldn’t get into it.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Related Candies

1. HiCHEW Yuzu & Valencia
2. Das French Salted Caramels
3. HiCHEW Assortment
4. Almond Crush Pocky
5. Bali’s Best Coffee & United Coffee Candy
6. Meiji Mild Bitter Chocolate Sticks