Aloha Maid Pink Guava Soda

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.

Nescafe Happy Pack w/Raspberry & Passionfruit KitKat

Nestlé loves you. No, really, it does. If you don't believe me, buy this Nescafé "Happy Pack" because it's their valentine to you. You can tell by the fact that they have plastered hearts all over everything. In fact, I'm sure that they would have made a heart-shaped KitKat to put inside of it had it not defied the laws of nature and snacking.


Even the insert in the box is shaped like a heart that you unfold. Nestlé knows that you'll be more receptive to their promotional materials if they give them to you in a geographic shape which expresses the company's affection for you.


The "Happy Pack" showed up at a local discount snack store for 168 yen (about $1.70). It includes 3 packets of flavored instant coffee and 3 mini size passionfruit and raspberry KitKats. Each mini bar has about the same amount of candy as 1.5 fingers of a conventional KitKat. I'll admit that I mainly bought this for the KitKats, and, to do justice to them, I need to rate the box's contents separately.


The three types of flavored instant coffee are green tea, orange and caramel latte, and café latté. I drank the café latté only. I'll admit that up front. I sent the green tea one to Marvo at the Impulsive Buy (along with one of the KitKats) and the orange one is still sitting around. I was very careful to prepare the coffee precisely as the directions state. That is, I carefully measured out the 130 ml. of water that was required. It was thick and foamy, but so very bland. It tasted just like regular, blah, instant coffee, weak and inoffensive, with too little coffee and too much powdered milk. The thing that is keeping me away from the last packet is the fact that this stuff is just full of corn syrup, and it doesn't taste sweet.

Because I would definitely not buy the instant coffee portion of this again, I'm giving the coffee an appropriately low rating.




The mini raspberry passionfruit KitKats mainly smell like raspberry. The outside of them is noticeably darker than the usual KitKat bar and has a nice bittersweet chocolate flavor. It complements the berry flavor very nicely and is also a nice mix with the limited sweetness of the passionfruit. If there is anything about this to complain about, it'd be that the raspberry completely overwhelms the passionfruit for the most part.

Because I'm not a super great fan of bittersweet chocolate, I can't really give this a very happy rating, but if I could buy these bars without the lame instant coffee, I'd definitely get them again. I think people who are fans of darker chocolate might really go for these and it's certainly one of the nicest fruit KitKats I've ever had.

Dounan Corn Caramels

There's a super funky shop in a neighboring area which sells all sorts of novelty items for the hip crowd that hangs around the live houses in the area. They sell a ton of imported junk like big plastic M & M's full of, well, M & M's and the kind of stuff your pervy uncle might take to a party to amuse himself. They also carry a huge variety of extreme and atypical sweets. One of the caramels they had, for instance, was "Ghengis caramels" with a picture of Ghengis Khan on the cover. I almost went for it, but chickened out and bought these corn caramels instead.


As is the case with many of the weird caramels I review, this is from Hokkaido. They are the Nestlé of the caramel trade, it would seem, in that they are intent on coming up with as many freaky caramel flavors as Nestlé Japan is with KitKats. I can't recall exactly what I paid for this, but I think it was in the ballpark of 100-150 yen (about a dollar to a dollar-fifty) for 18 small caramels.

Each caramel is around 16 calories and wrapped somewhat loosely in wax paper. I didn't open the plastic wrapper on this box for well over a month and they kept in pristine shape even in the summer heat and humidity. I'm guessing now that the seal is broken though, that they will get a bit gummy through time.

The caramels just smell sweet. I couldn't really detect any corn scent though these are made with real Hokkaido sweet corn. The flavor at first is pretty mild but the corn flavor ramps up as you chew. It really is like eating an ear of very sweet corn from a flavor point of view and is a pretty nice taste experience. You might expect it to be a tad strange, but I enjoyed it. However, I don't know if getting your corn in caramel form (as opposed to caramel corn) is everyone's cup of tea. I'd definitely consider getting these again if the mood struck me.

Lipton 0 Calorie Orange Tea

I've been told that Lipton yellow label tea is considered one of the more premium varieties of what the Japanese refer to as "black tea" that one can buy in Japan. The label seems to carry more prestige here than it does in other countries. Personally, I strongly dislike Lipton's yellow label tea and never buy it.

That being said, I adore their fatty, sweet, decadent cartons of milk tea. It is rich and has an edge of coconut flavor in it. Drinking a whole carton is an indulgence I rarely allow myself, but I really do love it. With my positive experiences of the calorie-dense milk tea, I decided to give this zero calorie carton of orange tea a try.

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of flavored tea. I like tea with milk and sweetener and can do without all of the infusions of herbs, flowers, and fruits that you sometimes find. That's not to say I've never met a flavored tea I didn't like, but just that I'll always choose plain tea. However, I'm so desperate for any sort of new no calorie beverage in Japan, that I was willing to set aside my lack of enthusiasm for flavored tea.


The tea smells very good. In fact, it has a distinct bouquet of orange juice. The tea seems to have just the slightest hint of syrup when you pour it. This may be due to the fact that one of the cocktail of chemicals that sweeten it is maltitol syrup. There's also Erythritol, Surcralose, and ascelfame potassium. Though the ingredients sound pretty dreadful, the tea is good. It is sweet without being too sweet and carries a strong flavor of orange capped with some tea bitterness. The orange tends to overwhelm at first, but the tea finishes.

This did seem to taste a little like orange Kool-aid at times, but I still enjoyed it. My feeling is that, while I would certainly buy this again if the mood struck me, it may not be for everyone. In particular, I think that the high amount of sweeteners may be a turn-off for those who are sensitive to them. Personally, I'm so accustomed to drinking diet sodas that I tend not to notice any but the worst chemical concentrations. It could be that the melange of sweeteners is used to mitigate the strong aftertaste of any given one, or it may be that I simply can't tell. At any rate, I can't wholeheartedly recommend this for others, but I can do so with caveats and say that I liked it.

Kameida Seika Dashi Sembei

Doing this blog has taught me many things and one of the most recent is that all of the individual and double-packaging in the world will not protect crunchy, savory snacks from going stale... no matter how solidly sealed it appears to be. This bag of sembei was consumed largely in the first month, then one cracker perhaps in the first six weeks. The final cracker, which I saved for tasting when I got my lazy ass around to writing a review, sat in the package alone for 6 months.


Now, perhaps it got lonely up there and decided to punish me, but it was horribly stale. It seems that the sealed individual packet and the outer plastic bag being loosely closed were not enough to keep the ravages of the atmosphere from dampening it's rice crackery appeal. Once you open the bag, do not count on the individual packets to keep things fresh. This is the newest wisdom that I impart to you, gentle readers.


Fortunately, I do recall that this cracker was crispy and had a lot of snap when I ate most of them, so I can vouch for the texture if you buy them and consume them within about a month. They smell slightly soy sauce-like with a vague hint of something difficult to pin down. I believe that is the mixture of flavors and spices that come with the "dashi" portion of this. Dashi is Japanese soup stock which is composed of various ingredients depending on the region it is made in and the tastes of the person making it. The flavor on these is very savory and meaty with hints of garlic, fish, and, of course, soy sauce. The melange of flavors is really quite pleasant, and I'm not a particular fan of fish.

I really enjoyed these, but I had a little trouble choosing between "indifferent" and "happy" because, while I'd be delighted to eat these again if offered one, I'm not sure I'd buy a whole bag of my own volition again. It's not that they aren't tasty, but rather that I think I'd go for some other type of sembei over this if I had a lot of options. Part of the problem is that one cracker, though generously sized, is 64 calories, which seems like a lot for one cracker when I can have two brown sugar sembei crackers for the same number of calories. However, I wholeheartedly recommend these if you particularly enjoy Japanese soup flavors.