Hi-Chew – Fanta

I’m fairly certain this is nothing new, and is just another rebrand of a soda flavour they keep bringing back, but I have fond memories of them from childhood, so I’ll allow it. I guess doing a branded collaboration with Fanta helps get more eyes on it, but I’ve got no expectation that this would be any different from the soda flavours I had as a wee lad.

A nice distribution here – 6 orange, 6 grape and 4 melon. I’m not sure how Fanta operates over in Japan, but I imagine orange is their most popular flavour worldwide, so it makes sense. Grape is also just an all round awesome flavour so I’m down for that. Melon is just sort of there – I can’t say I’ve had too many melon sodas but the ones I did have in Japan were pretty good, so we’ll see if that applies here as well.

Starting with the melon – the weirdest thing about these flavours is that you can tell they added something to it to give it a similar flavour to a carbonated Fanta, but because it’s not actually fizzy or carbonated, it’s like your brain tries to fill in the gaps between the sensation of bubbles and the flavour you expect when there’s bubbles.

A similar issue plagues the orange – the flavour is undeniably an orange soda, but without the carbonation it just tastes of a super sweet orange drink. If you’re into that then you’ll love this, though truthfully I’m not sure if I can have more than one in a sitting. Let it be known this is exactly like the soda though, for what it’s worth. If you’re expecting real fruit flavours, maybe a soda based flavour isn’t the place for that.

Last up is grape, and if you’ve ever had a grape soda before, well this tastes a little more like grape juice than the soda I’ve had. Oddly enough it feels like Hi-Chew decided to go with something a little more real tasting, and opted to go with a little more fruit flavouring. This one while still like a soda, is also enough like the original Hi-Chew red grape flavours that it can stand on it’s own. It does however, have a strange almost medicinal aftertaste which I assume is form them trying to emulate that carbonation without actually including an carbon dioxide to make it fizzy.

Nostalgia aside, this is a decent variety of soda flavoured chewy candies. If the soda flavour concept isn’t for you, there’s not much to offer other than the superb texture, which realistically you could get with any other flavour. If however you enjoy soda flavours, these are pretty solid. Once you get past the fact that it’s not carbonated, I’d say these flavours are pretty spot on from the Japanese sodas I’ve had thus far.