A Brief Blogger Snafu

Just a quick note to say that I'm aware that the pictures aren't loading in the most recent review. It's an issue with Blogger, and I'm not sure that there's anything I can do about it. I would say to wait and try to reload the post later when the issue will likely be cleared up!

Sorry for the inconvenience! And thank you for reading. :-)

Pure Orange Gummy Candy

Note: Blogger appears to have eaten the pictures for this post, and I'm afraid I no longer have the originals so the best I can do is a screenshot of the product from Kanro's site. Sorry about that!

One of the bad points about writing this blog is that I rarely get a chance to return to the items I sincerely enjoyed. There's only so much junk you can eat, and despite my liberal sampling of various sweets, I am trying to be very careful about how much food of suspect nutritional value that I consume. Most of the time, I'm eating small portions and letting my husband finish the rest or eating the remainder through time.

I really like the Pure line of gummy sweets. I've only had the blueberry kind that I reviewed last October once or twice since then, even though I liked it a lot. There are a several other flavors, but none of them grabbed me enough to place trying them at the head of a long line of other curious foods until I saw these navel orange gummies. I hate oranges, but I love orange-flavored things. This is one of those rare occasions where I dislike the real fruit and like things flavored like it. Generally, it's the other way around (especially for bananas and strawberries).

These gummies, brought to us by Kanro, are sprinkled in the same sort of pixie dust coating as all the other Pure gummies. The coating is a sort of citric acid powder combined with what seems to be sugar. It adds a certain tart and sweet quality to the candy. The candies are clean to hold and firm, but soft and easy to bite into.

These taste just like orange juice. There's a strong hit of navel orange flavor. The sourness seems to ramp up the intensity of the sweetness. My husband says he finds these super sweet, but I find them merely super intense in the best possible way. I could easily eat the entire bag in one imprudent sitting, but I try to keep consumption down to no more than three 12-calorie jellies per day. Interestingly, there is paprika included as an ingredient in these, but you can't taste it at all. It's clearly included for color only.

All of the Pure gummies that I've seen are in 46 gram (1.6 oz.) bags for about a dollar (100 yen), but I think there are probably other sizes out there. If you'd like to see the array of flavors available at any given time, you can visit the Pure Pure Garden web site. It's in Japanese, but if you click on the pictures of the bags at the bottom, the illustrations of the fruit make it clear what types you can get.

There are few snacks I've had of which I can say I'd want to continue to buy them when I return to the U.S. This is one of them. I just love that sour and sweet mix with the real fruit flavor of these gummies.

Akagi Grape Ice Pops

Part of the design on the front of this box depicts a grape that has been partially peeled. I'm not sure what image peeled grapes conjure up in the minds of most people, but, for me, it brings to mind decadent Roman officials. You can see them at their bacchanalia asking slaves to peel their grapes just before doing unsavory things to the backsides of their poor servants.

If the people at Akagi had thought of that, I'm guessing this box design could have been a lot more interesting. Who doesn't want to consume something and feel like they're taking part in a bacchanal? The fact that these are something to be slurped and sucked on only helps with the (okay, rather disturbing) imagery.


In a previous review, I sampled Akagi's similarly constructed mikan pops to great satisfaction. These are similar in construction in that they have bits of fruit embedded in a fruit juice base. You can see shadowy bits of white grape (because they've peeled the skin, you see) in the bar above. Each bar is the same size as the mikan version as well at 63 ml. (2.1 oz.) though the calorie count is slightly higher at 55.

Once freed from its clear plastic prison, you have a nice adult popsicle with good grape flavor and bits of fruit. I found the texture of the grapes less obtrusive than the bits of mikan. I'm guessing that this is because mikan, as a citrus fruit, is a bit stringy whereas grapes are just blobs. Grapes also simply freeze better. These bars are a little sweeter than the mikan ones, but still not over the top sweet.

I'll definitely buy these again, and if you want to keep something on hand for sore throats, these are really good. Of course, they're also really great if you love grape popsicles and just want to have one.

Kameda Seika Curry Sembei "Joy Pack"

How many failures does it take before one should give up on a good version of something coming along? Well, my previous experience with curry sembei was not great. The taste was good, but the texture ruined it. This time, I came across a variety from a company that has not let me down on the sembei front, Kameda Seika. I found this for about 140 yen (about $1.40) at a Family Mart convenience store and figured I'd go to the Japanese-Indian well in the hopes of drawing some sweet water this time. Besides, this is a "joy pack", so I was counting on truth in advertising.


There are 74 grams (2.6 oz.) of crackers in the bag. If you snarf down the whole thing, it's 370 calories. The crackers smell just like curry powder. Each cracker is about the size of a large potato chip. You can put a whole one in your mouth (or at least I can, and my mouth is pretty small). The flavor is a decent curry flavor, but much weaker than the cheaper Sanshin curry that I sampled previously. It was just a little hot toward the end, but definitely not for lovers of a really good burn. And, I love a good burn.

The crackers are fresh and crispy. They're "soft" sembei which means they're puffier inside and not brittle, but the flavor is somehow wrong. There's too much of a Japanese mixture in it. This could be something about the way the rice crackers are baked, or it could be the soy flavors that are added to it. I'm not sure, but I just wasn't thrilled with these. Don't get me wrong, they were fine and I'll easily finish the bag, but they just weren't good enough to justify having them again.

I'm pretty much giving up on curry sembei after these two tries. It's not that I don't think they can be done right, but just that I figure if Kameda Seika can't get it right, no one can.

Sports Drink KitKat

I'm not sure how many people out there have never drunk a sports drink, but I'm one of them. I've just never seen the appeal of drinking anything after exercise besides water. It hydrates and it is free. I guess that's part of the reason people are told they need to restore their bodily balance with potions concocted by expert beverage makers. They aren't going to make any money off of you if you drink water. Nonetheless, somehow primitive man managed to make due after a big bison hunt with water, so I think I will survive as well.


In Japan, there are a plethora of sports drinks which I've never sampled (and probably never will). I once read that sports drinks are essentially Kool-aid types of drinks with salt added and that turned me off. It also set up some expectations of this bar which were not very high. I was in for a bit of a surprise. This was nothing like what I had expected.


The bar smells a bit like lemon-lime or grapefruit. Despite being white chocolate, it doesn't carry the "sweet" smell I associate with it. The taste is a melange of fruit flavors and yogurt. It's sweet, but not painfully so. I think that the part of this which resembles citrus fruits (mainly lemon) and the sourness of yogurt balances out the sweetness. If this is really what a sports drink tastes like in Japan, I may give one a try some day.

I was surprised to find that I liked this and even more surprised to that my husband liked it. He doesn't like yogurt (or grapefruit), but he enjoyed this. I think that anyone who liked the lemon KitKat might also like this. I'd certainly buy it again. Note that this was released on June 22 so it should be around for awhile.