Meiji – Poifull Drink Mix

This is an interesting mix, to put it mildly. Perhaps it’s because I’m old now, but this mix isn’t particularly my jam. Soda flavoured snacks seem a bit excessive to me, given that most sodas are just sugar at this point. The target demographic for this is definitely younger kids and if I was a few decades younger, I might go crazy for this.

The flavours are cola, lemon lime soda ramune and strawberry soda. There’s also some weird promo where some of the pieces are shaped as hearts, but I have no idea what’s going on. Starting with the cola, it reminds me of cola hard candies I had as a kid. Something about the cola flavour is very easy to simulate, and this does it quite well. I’m not a big fan of cola flavours these days, but I can appreciate this one.

Lemon is mostly sweet, not very tart but slightly sour, and has a carbonated flavour to it, if that makes any sense.

The ramune tastes….well if you know what ramune tastes like these do that quite well, for better or worse. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a classic Japanese soda that has a distinct lemon or citrus type bubble gum flavour. It’s not a flavour I particularly enjoy, but this one nails it. It also has a bit of a noticeable, distinct aftertaste which I’m not a fan of.

The last one is strawberry – as you can imagine with soda flavour, it’s mostly just sweet strawberry without much of the tart or floral notes that fruit flavours typically have. They do have an element of what I imagine is citric or malic acid to give it a slight carbonated quality to it. Probably the best outcome of this set is that the strawberry pieces seem to outnumber all the other ones, which is ideal for me since out of all of them it’s the best one.

These little jelly bean shaped candies may lead you to believe they are simple jelly beans, but nay, that is not to be. These are similar in shape and initial texture as jelly beans with a crunchy candy outer shell, but these aren’t particularly hard or give any meaningful resistance. The shell gives way to a very gummy, very bouncy texture. You could think of them as a cross between a jelly bean and a gummy – the inside is basically a chewy gummy candy. Honestly, even though I don’;t like the flavour of these, the texture alone makes them well worth a try. I’m quite certain if these were more standard affair for jelly beans, the candy would be more popular. A big complaint I hear is jelly beans are too sticky and get stuck everywhere, and these solve that since the gummy center doesn’t really stick to anything as you chew on them.

All in all the overall experience of Poifull is quite enjoyable, and had these flavours been different I may have enjoyed it even more. If you like soda flavoured things, by all means, but if you have another variation o Poifull to try, go with those instead.