Puku Puku Tai – Berry

Unicorns are a magical idea, aren’t they? A mythical creature that looks like a horse but has a giant horn on it’s forehead, and potentially poops rainbows. I feel like as I get older, the concept of unicorns becomes more colourful and dare I say, garish. Anything unicorn themed these days is usually 3/4 of a vibrant rainbow, and starts with pink. I guess when Meito was coming up with some packaging designs for a flavour of their famous Puku Puku Tai snack, they decided they wanted something equally colourful and night mythical.

I’m curious if they decided on the colouring and packaging of this product first, or the flavour. I guess the double berry works well when we examine the duality of this fish, a true reflection of a person’s soul and duality of man. I could get all philosophical right now, but all you need to know is this fish has two colours; one side of the wafer is pink and the other is a like, sky blue. They really want to hammer home the fact that this is magical or something.

Visually, the colour is appealing, there’s no doubt about that. Whether it’s appealing for something I’m about to consume is another matter altogether. I feel like in nature, the colours I see in front of me are usually colours of dangerously toxic or poisonous plants, neither of which should be consumed. Then again, Starbucks has a unicorn frappuccino, so….I guess these colourways are a thing now.

The smell will definitely catch your attention, for better or worse. It smells very sweet, and I don’t get any noticeable berry. I mean, I can kind of see how you could interpret the smell as mixed berries, but I find it to be much closer to something like cotton candy. In trying to figure out which berries they were trying to emulate, the only thing I could find was that it’s supposed to be strawberry and raspberry. I guess I could see that if you dipped raspberry into corn syrup multiple times. I gotta say, based on the smell, I don’t have high hopes for this.

Let’s start with texture, since that’s pretty straightforward. The outer shell, despite its wacky appearance, is simply a thin waffle like texture. Think of your typical ice cream cone, and that’s basically how the outer shell is. It’s soft and crumbly, so much so that you should probably get a napkin or bowl unless you don’t care about your floors or have carpet. The inside is best described as aerated chocolate. If you’ve ever had an Aero bar, you’ll know exactly what it is. Instead of a solid piece of chocolate, it’s injected with bubbles. These bubbles give it an interestingly soft, and melts quickly. I’m no scientists, but I’d wager the melt is faster than standard solid chocolate because of all the surface area created by the bubbles. The result is a nice, melty but light snack.

The flavour…this one is interesting to say the least. I’m not sure whether I like it or not yet. So I’ll try my best to describe it first. Imagine if you will, if cotton candy existed in chocolate form. That’s basically what this experience was like – the chocolate melts away very quickly, kind of similar to how cotton candy would, albeit instead of leaving sugar behind in your mouth this leaves some chocolate. The flavour is overwhelmingly sweet to the point that after the chocolate begins to melt, do you really taste the white chocolate base on the tail end. Once that melts away, it’s only in the aftertaste that you realize the flavour was supposed to be raspberry. If there was any hint of strawberry, I didn’t get any.

Here is where things get confusing. By all accounts, this is absolutely not a snack that is aimed at me. I prefer my snacks and candies to have subtlety, flavour and I appreciate when it takes me on a roller coaster, as stuck up as that sounds. I’m not crazy about snacks that have to hit me multiple times over the head with all the sugar or flavour. Based on that it’s pretty obvious that it’s aimed more at a younger audience. Or maybe the elderly as well. My grandparents used to tell me that as they got older their sense of taste became less sensitive and more dulled, and required stronger flavours. This snack right here would definitely pack a punch that even they could taste. I’m still tasting that raspberry flavour, over 15 minutes after I finished the whole thing.

And yet, despite all that, I kind of enjoyed it. Perhaps it was experiencing a snack designed for young children to remind me of what it’s like to be a young child. To give in to reckless abandon, throw caution to the wind and enjoy an overly sweet snack without thinking about grown up things like flavour or texture. I guess when I take that into consideration, this gets points for helping me rediscover some childlike wonder. Either that or the sugar rush from the chocolate is finally hitting me, and I’m half an hour away from crashing horribly.

Would I do this again? Probably not. I think once is enough for at least the next year or so. Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It’s just strange enough (and pretty enough) that I could see this appealing to people. Much like the Starbucks drinks, I imagine most of the sales of this product is from the novelty of trying it at least once.