Despite my bad experience with the only drink I've ever purchased from Ito En, I decided to give the company's pink guava a shot. This is part of their "Aloha Maid" series which features tropical fruit flavors sodas in a low calorie soft drink. Besides this pink guava, there is also a lemon ice tea and a fruit mix that includes pineapple, orange, mango and lychee.
Though this is made with both aspartame and sucralose, it has 60 calories per bottle because of the guava juice that has been added to it. This makes for a somewhat mixed taste experience. There is a light guava flavor and this is generally quite refreshing, but there is also a clearly detectable taste of artificial sweetener. Since this is more of a flavored water than a strong soft drink, the sweetener taste is not masked as well as it might be in a drink like Coca-Cola. One interesting point about this is that it has been naturally colored with purple potato rather than artificial coloring.
This was okay. If I wanted a lightly flavored carbonated water, I might even consider buying this again, but ultimately it's just not that impressive. Considering the experience I had with their salty lemon, this is actually a step up in my experience with Ito En's beverages.
