Lotte Ice Breakers (Product Information)

When I was living in Japan, one of the little things I enjoyed was sampling the various Mintia flavors. For those who may not recall, Mintia is the Japanese equivalent of a TicTac. It's tiny little pellets, not necessarily mint-flavored, which I imagine are supposed to be handy for breath freshening, but that I generally kept around to get that lingering coffee taste out of my mouth or the weird aftertaste of Japanese chocolate. While I loved the creamy milk chocolate in Japan in general, it always did leave a funky taste on the tongue and a bit of Mintia went a long way. It also helps those with an oral fixation who would like not to apply it to other things in the presence of civilized company.

In the last 6 months or so of my stay in Japan, I sampled a vast array of interesting Mintia flavors. I think I only reviewed a few here, but I sampled far more in my everyday life. In fact, one of my last acts of snack advocacy in Japan was to get my brother-in-law hooked on Mintia by sharing a mikan (Japanese tangerine) one with him shortly before we left. The advantage of tiny little mints like Asahi's Mintia and Lotte's Ice Breakers, which are the latter's attempt to slice out a piece of the Mintia market's pie, is that they provide a flavor pack for a low calorie and monetary cost. At an average price of about 100 yen ($1.20) per pack of 50 tiny little tablets, it's a pretty good deal.

The difference between Mintia and Ice Breakers is that Lotte's offering comes in pretty boring flavors. They offer sour grape, sour green apple and sour lemon. Like Mintia, you get 50 little tablets per pack and they are sugar-free. While there isn't much in the way of sugar-free candy in Japan, gum and mints tend to be the exception because of the possibility of their causing tooth decay (not because of concerns about calories). Lotte, in what I can only imagine is an attempt to draw attention to a product which seems to be utterly lacking in imagination both in terms of presentation (same tablets, same packaging, same product as Mintia), and pedestrian flavors, is using a flamboyant  actor named "Jonte Moaning" in the commercials. He's an interesting choice not because he was associated with Janet Jackson during his career, but because he is not too dissimilar from all of us other grunts who came to Japan and ended up teaching something. In his case, he taught dance in Hiroshima. There's an interesting interview with him here. I like how he laughs when the interviewer asserts that he is big in Japan. Many small time celebrities, musicians, and actors lie about being "big in Japan" in order to promote themselves and he seems to be acknowledging that their perception of him is a bit overblown. Prior to this promotion for Lotte, I never saw anything featuring him in Japan. Of course, I didn't watch much television (and actually still do not) and he could be the bee's knees in Japan and I might not know it.

The commercial is currently available on Lotte's "CM" (what the Japanese call commercials) page. You can view it from this page by clicking on the appropriate thumbnail while it lasts. Note that the link won't be there forever as Lotte rotates out the commercials after the products get new promotions or are withdrawn from the market. They even have a Facebook page with a little under 70 "likes", which sort of makes me sad. Mintia has about 3,400 on theirs. I wonder to what extent using Jonte Moaning in a very eye-catching (and slightly disturbing) commercial reminiscent of a less heterosexual Ruby Rhod in The Fifth Element will amp up their product recognition. It certainly made me take notice.

Mintia Rich Grapefruit

Prolific movie reviewer Roger Ebert once said something to the effect that what he wanted out of a movie was for it to be something that he had not seen before. Given how many movies he digested as a movie reviewer, this would become an increasingly difficult bill to fill. The more active experience you have with something, the harder it becomes for the next experience to impress you.

Note that I say "active" experience and not "experience". Most of us sleepwalk through our sensory lives. We wake up and barely taste the expensive coffee we pick up at the local coffee chain shop. Well, when I say, "we", I mean other people. I make an active effort to attend to the taste, smell, and texture of every food I consume. This is the gift and curse of being a food blogger, as I'm sure Roger Ebert can't watch a movie without attending to various details that most of us pedestrian viewers fail to notice (and therefore can just enjoy our movie without any extraneous nonsense).

In no way am I suggesting that my sense of taste is refined from attending to all that I eat, but rather that it becomes pretty jaded. Things that people who are not food reviewers enjoy will be those which I find lacking because I'm paying perhaps too much attention. One of the reasons that foodies, and I'm not a "foodie", but more of a "junk foodie", seek food further and further afield of their usual scope is that they're bored. They start to think that "different" is "better" because this is valuable to them personally, just as Roger Ebert embraced and endorsed movies which I found unappealing because, for him, "different" was "better".

That's a big intro for a review of the Japanese equivalent of Tic-Tacs, but I'm making a point about all Japanese food and snacks. These are awesome in part because they aren't the little smooth pellets that shook in ones pocket throughout childhood, though they do essentially fill the same niche. The main difference is that Mintia plays into the higher Japanese tolerance for sour things and a mixture of savory and sweet together. Tic-Tacs play closer to sweetness, which suits American palates better.  Mintia tends to reflect basic Japanese cuisine's flavors. Japanese people like things less sweet, more sour, and more bitter because they're used to it. Jaded palates like mine like these things a lot because they're bored.

That being said, I like Mintia because the flavors are usually pretty intense. Every tiny little sugar-free pellet of this "rich grapefruit" flavor is sour without making your mouth pucker and sweet enough for balance. It evens tastes like "real" grapefruit to a fair extent, though without any of the intense bitterness of the real deal. The first ingredient is "grapefruit sugar" followed by a scary cocktail of sweeteners that the likes of me does not mind but those that are sensitive to them may want to avoid. The packaging tells us that there are some sort of grapefruit chips in them as well as some sort of "grapefruit aroma" addition. They do smell good, though I doubt many people other than myself will be sniffing at them. You are, after all, normal rather than a bizarre junk foodie.

My only "problem" with Mintia, and I've never had a bad experience with them, is that I tend to want to eat a whole package at once. At 24 calories per 50 teeny tiny pellets, this isn't much of an expense calorically, and at around 100-120 yen ($1.23-$1.47) per pack, it's not hard on the wallet. It is, however, hard on the tongue as these are closer to the rough texture of a pressed powdered candy than the slick smoothness of a Tic-Tac and tend to be abrasive on your sensitive body parts. I'd definitely buy these again, but I'd have to wait until after my tongue has healed. 

Mintia Summer Powerful Plum

Beavis and Butthead is coming back to MTV, and this may seem like a strange association, but I sampled this Mintia in honor of their return. If you weren't around during this particular era, the dynamic dimwits used to hawk Mintia in Japan. I'm not really much of a mint fan, which is odd since I've become such a gum fan and the two tend to go hand in hand and I never tried Mintia before this. However, I do like Beavis and Butthead, and you can reach whatever conclusions that you like about me as a consequence of that admission. I'm secure enough in my intellect not to feel that liking really dumb comedy reflects poorly on me. Really. I'm not insecure. Nope.

I chose this flavor because it's about as Japanese a flavor as one is going to get. There are little blobs of what look like umeboshi (pickled plum) dancing over a Hiroshige-style wave. The little banner on the right is reminiscent of those that hang outside of shops, particularly when they advertise Japanese shaved ice (kakigori). I found this at Family Mart convenience store for 120 yen ($1.54) and snapped it up in a rush before heading back to work.

Plum can be a bit of a risky flavor in Japan, as I learned when a student once gave me a hard candy flavored with "ume". It was a horrendous mix of sour vinegar flavors and sweet sugary flavor with harsh plum. When I popped the top on this, it smelled funky, but also familiar. I recognized it as a scent reminiscent, but far from identical to umeboshi. This was worrying, but I gamely tried them anyway. Each mint is extremely tiny. In fact, I'd wager they are 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a Tic Tac. I had to eat about 3 at once to get a sense of the taste.

As for the flavor, it has the slight tang and sour flavor of pickled plum with a decent level of sweetness. It's an odd combo, but it works. In fact, it worked so well that I rubbed a sore spot on my tongue sucking on these things repeatedly. They're pressed powder and a bit abrasive so if you stupidly overdo it, like I did, then you're going to regret it. I was surprised at how much I loved these, but they may not "work" for everyone.