Random Picture #218

It's becoming clear that cranberry is now a thing in Japan. I've been seeing more items containing cranberries including some chocolate-covered ones. I've done a bit of research and this sort of spread of cranberries isn't truly new to Japan, but it's definitely seeing a surge right now which I either didn't experience or notice during my 23 years in Japan. Since I love cranberries, and found them in short supply while I was in Tokyo, I hope I would have noticed if suddenly cookies and candies featuring them started popping up all over the place at the same time. However, I'm not so arrogant about my perceptual skills as to say it didn't fly right by me.

These "all cranberry" cookies are the latest in the long line of fruits that Tohato has dried out and sandwiched between two biscuits in their rip-off of Garibaldi biscuits. I've not been entirely impressed by the "all fruit" line in the past so I gave it a miss. I may be persuaded otherwise in the future, but I have more than enough snack review fodder lying around and don't need to toss another pack on the pile. 

All Cranberry VE Plus Cookies

My husband operates from a mindset that would seem to be pretty logical, but doesn't actually work, when it comes to food and how bad it is for you. His notion is that if the food isn't that tasty, and especially if it isn't that sweet, it can't be all that bad for you.

When we first came to Japan, he used to buy Tohato's All Raisin cookies in accord with that type of thinking. They had raisins, which are a sort of dried up fruit and fruit is good for you, and they weren't very sweet. They had no creamy filling, icing, or sugary topping. It turned out though that All Raisin cookies weren't exactly the epitome of healthy eating despite their lack of food fun quotient, and he stopped eating them.


Fast forward to the present and I run across a small bag of All Cranberry cookies made in the same fashion as the All Raisin ones which I haven't sampled for well over 15 years. I love cranberries so I decided to revisit Tohato's healthy-sounding cookie now that it was in a flavor I liked far more than raisin. This packet of ten 3-cm (1.1 in.) square cookies was 98 yen ($1.03) at a local drug store. The VE Plus, incidentally, is for a whole slew of added vitamins including A, D, E, and 4 different B-vitamins and Calcium.

The cookies smell like cranberries, unsurprisingly. The texture of the cookie is rather crispy with some chewiness from the cranberries. The cookie itself doesn't have much of a flavor. It's more of a generalized biscuit flavor than anything else so you're getting the strongest flavor from the cranberries. Besides the vitamins, there are a lot of healthier grains in these including rye and spelt flour and oats. Sucralose is also used as a sweetener to cut back on the sugar added. Each tiny cookie has 16 calories (the entire bag is 155 or so).

I really liked these and would have given them an even higher rating except I though I detected a slight "plastic" aftertaste. I wonder if storing these cookies for 3 weeks in the summer (before opening them) on top of my refrigerator caused some of the plastic bag's chemicals to leech into them. If so, that's an unappetizing thought. It might also simply be some preservative or processing aftertaste from the cranberries that I was detecting. Since I don't like too sweet foods and I liked the texture of these a lot, I would recommend them to anyone who wants something a bit healthier to nosh on.

Note that Tohato has expanded their line of "All" cookies a lot since I last checked into them. In addition to raisin and cranberry, they also carry peach, apple, adzuki, coconut, mango and pineapple. The mango and pineapple are "dessert" versions so they're probably not as "healthy" as the raisin and cranberry versions. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of these exotic flavors in my usual haunts, but I'll be certain to sample them if I run across them.

KitKat Triple Berry

You can't tell from the picture, but this KitKat is in one of the most beautiful boxes you're going to find on a run-of-the-mill candy bar. It has a star pattern embossed across it which you can only see when the box reflects the light in just the right way. It's very sparkly and quite attractive to people who are easily impressed by shiny things.


Across the bottom of the box, it states that there is 2.8% cranberry, 1.1% blueberry, and 1.9% strawberry. On the back, it mentions that this content is included in powder form, so don't expect little bits of real fruit to enliven the taste of this bar.


Even though there is supposed to be more cranberry than strawberry, the bars smell pretty much like strawberry. It's a muted smell which seems a bit like strawberry frosting. The berry flavor is infused into the bar both in the pink filling between the wafers and the marbled white chocolate exterior.

I'm always suspicious of white chocolate-based KitKats, but this was surprisingly good. While it's a little sweeter than a regular KitKat, the berry flavors are multilayered and enjoyable. The first note is muted cranberry, followed by strawberry and finishing with the blueberry. The only thing that is missing is the sharper or sometimes sour notes of the respective berries, but I'm not sure that would have worked well in a KitKat anyway.

As with most Japanese KitKats, the box contains two packages with two fingers and I ate two fingers for my sampling. While I really liked the bars and felt the flavor was very well-balanced, I still had that throat burning sensation that one sometimes gets from having eaten candy that's too sweet. These KitKats aren't any more sugary than average (115 calories per two fingers is in line with the usual for KitKats), but the sweetness seems to build in your mouth as you eat more. Also, there's a definite cloying berry aftertaste that lingers after you eat half of the box.

This is a nice bar, and I did enjoy it, but I think it'd be better with some coffee or tea to cleanse the palate a bit between fingers. If you see it, you'll want to buy it for no other reason than it looks pretty, and it's so very Japanese looking.

This is also reviewed at Tasty Japan.