Meiji – 70% Strawberry Chocolate

Meiji is not a brand I associate with chocolate bars. I associate it with chocolate yes, but it’s usually chocolate adjacent snacks or chocolate doing a buddy cop film with someone else like an almond or grape gummy. All that is to say, I don’t necessarily think of Meiji as a brand that does straight up chocolate all that well, but it does chocolate based snacks real well.

So the main selling point here is that this chocolate bar is making a return after a very long absence from shelves. Well, that and the fact that it’s supposedly made up of 70% strawberry fruit. The first thought that pops into my head is the fact that white chocolate is less than 35% actual cocoa, so I can only imagine this would essentially be a white base with lots of strawberry fruit or juice making up most of the bar.

Based off smell alone, this reminds me of a strawberry ice cream. I imagine it’s a white chocolate base and just loaded with strawberry. Going off taste, I’m not too far off here – the chocolate base is fairly muted and you only get a hint of that dairy. The real star here is obviously the strawberries, and it does not disappoint. If you ever wondered what it would be like to make a chocolate mostly out of strawberry puree, this is most likely what you would get. I’m not a big fan of white chocolate bases in general, but I am when it’s loaded with mostly strawberry. It has just the right amount of bright, fruity strawberry flavour to it with the hint of chocolatey dairy to it as well.

The texture is pretty typical from a white chocolate – it’s fairly soft, pretty melty and doesn’t stand up to heat too well. It melts nicely on the palate and releases that lovely strawberry flavour. There’s bits of freeze dried strawberry all throughout, so it has an ever slightly gritty finish. It’s all part of the experience. I’m honestly a little shocked how much I enjoy this, on a multitude of levels. For one, I figured this would just be a novelty flavour, so to enjoy this enough to put it on the permanent roster, is shocking to say the least.

I have always had a penchant for that artificial strawberry flavour, but this is next level. Not only does it taste more like actual strawberries, it works surprisingly well in chocolate form. It’s almost upsetting how I haven’t known about this sooner, but I imagine people who fell in love with it the first time have been eagerly waiting this bars return as well. Consider me part of the club now. I’m hooked.