I filmed plenty of videos and sent a lot of stuff that I haven’t reviewed to my house in the US, so I will still be able to make updates while my backup supply lasts. After that, I should hopefully have people in Japan who can still send me new treats to try out. Don’t worry! Things will continue on, but the info will not be as breaking as it once was. Alas.

Anways, the most recent KitKat flavor I saw before moving was:

Ume Soda KitKat

Unfortunately, I forgot two separate packs of these in two separate refrigerators on two separate occasions, so I was never able to try them out. I sent a box or two to my house via surface mail, so I will try these out eventually. We will just have to wait until then. =(

Los Angeles BBQ Chicken Pringles

I’ve never been to LA, so I can’t comment on whether or not they actually sell BBQ chicken wrappen in a tortilla that you are supposed to eat while walking. Do these taste like BBQ chicken? Kind of.  It tastes like sweet BBQ sauce, and like the standard BBQ flavor you can get back in America only, again, sweeter. There wasn’t anything tasting like chicken here, which is pretty par for the course for Pringles. They’ve never had a chicken-themed flavor that tasted like actualy chicken.

And in this corner…

New York Cheese Dog Pringles

I’m not sure if that is some kind of typo or if the street in question here belongs to the people of New Yorker. Either way, when I think “New York”, cheese dogs certainly aren’t the first thing that come to mind, and I don’t know how qualified they are to represent New York, but none of that matters, I suppose.

Again, the first thing I thought of is that these taste initially like BBQ sauce, althought it’s a very weak and subtle version. When compared to the the BBQ Chicken chips, these do taste kind of “cheesy” in comparison, but not so much when tasted by themselves. They don’t come off as really cheesy, but they do have kind of a smoked flavor that is more similar in taste to a hot dog than the chicken ones were to BBQ chicken.

So, in terms of being accurate, the Cheese Dog ones are better, and I have to admit that I like them better than the chicken ones when it comes to just tasting good as well. Here’s hoping nobody gets shot over this review.

Peach and Mango drink

Here’s a drink that’s a combination of peach and mango with an overall yogurt flavor to it. This “World’s Kitchen” brand often releases different kinds of drinks supposedly inspired by various countries, and this time around, they say that they got the idea from Hungary.

Dessert Mango Milk Tea

The Kocha Kaden Desserts line also brings out many different kinds of really sweet kinds of milk tea. They’ve done caramel, strawberry, and this time around, they’re doing mango. This really tastes like mango and milk tea separately, but at the same time (if that makes any sense). You can taste the mango, and you can taste milk tea, but for some reason, it doesn’t come off as tasting like “mango milk tea”. The previous varieties got a little too sweet about halfway through the bottle, but I’ve had no problem finishing off many of these.

Mango Pudding Country Ma'am cookies

Country Ma’am is a brand that I’ve, unfortunately, been neglecting since I started reporting on flavors. They always are coming out with new flavors of cookies every season, and have been doing so as far back as I can remember. Well the neglect ends now!

They certainly look the part.

For a cookie, these taste surprisingly accurate. There is a lot of mango flavor in these tiny little cookies. The while chocolate chips get completely overshadowed by the mango flavor of the cookie, but they still had that nice texture that comes with chewing on a chocolate chip cookie.

They normally reccommend that you microwave them for 20 seconds or so to make them hot and moist, and normally, this is a good idea.  I thought that they flavor was more pronounced when eaten “cold”, but what it lacks in flavor, it makes up for in being realy moist and warm (although doing so always makes them kind of oily).

Mango Pudding KitKat

Of course there’s a new KitKat flavor as well. Unfortunately, those ripoff “combo packs” are back in Pog form once again. At least this time around, the chocolate to mango ratio is a lot better than with previous flavors. In this particular bag, you get 7 pairs of milk chocolate and 6 pairs of mango pudding. Still a long way to go, but things are getting better (I gueeessss).

An individual mango pudding KitKat.

Unfortunately for the KitKat, there’s a lot of competition in the mango flavor department, and these don’t really stand up to the others, specifically the Country Ma’am cookies. There’s a nice mango smell to them, and there’s a decent initial mango flavor, but it doesn’t really last. As you keep eating them, the flavor kind of fades into more of a generic white chocolate wafer with a hint of mango. If these were the only snacks in town, I might have given them a more favorable review, because they are pretty tasty, but unfortunately, there are others who can do mango better.

Coconut Mango Cocktail

Even the alcohol gets frutier in the summertime, much to my delight. This “coconut mango” flavor sounded like it would be right up my alley, but by trying to pull off three flavors at once, they end up lacking with each one. They mix all of this with vodka, but these things never really taste like alcohol, so that’s never a problem. The mango doesn’t taste as good when compared to the peach and milk tea drink mentioned earlier, and the little bit of grapefruit that they decided to add in just detracts from the mango and makes it more sour than I felt it should be. That might just be to cover up the alcohol taste. In a time like this, I would expect the sweetness of the coconut flavor to come in and make everything better, but there was barely any coconut flavor to be had, which is what attracted me to this in the first place. If they had axed the grapfruit in favor of making the coconut flavor stronger, I could see myself enjoying this a lot more, but alas.

The large tapestry outside the restaurant.

KFC has a new line of drinks that “Aren’t quite a shake. Aren’t quite a smoothie”. The four flavors are:

Cookies & Cream

Caramel Crunch

Orange Sorbet

Strawberry Banana

Apparently they are only available at 19 stores in all of Japan, so I should have had one when I had the chance. Here’s a promotional video that tells you nothing about the drinks:

New at Wendy’s:

Spicy Chili Cheeseburger

The Spicy Chili Cheeseburger doesn’t look like anything too special. They just took their regular Wendy’s Chili and put it on a burger. Perhaps it’s a great combination, but they’re not winning any creativity points here. Maybe they saw some customers putting this together themselves, and they decided to try and market it to everyone. I’ll give it a shot.

Sports Drink KitKat

Apparently, this is a collaboration between Nestle and the JFA Dream Asia Project that looks to promote soccer within Asia and Japan.  If it’s like most of the sports drinks here, it will probably have a slightly citrus, more than likely grapefruit, flavor. I don’t think that these will be all too refreshing, nor will the replenish your electrolytes, but I doubt that’s the point on these.

I’ve been looking for these for about a week now with no luck. There one more place that I’d like to check out, but if it doesn’t turn up, I’m sure I can find at least one store that has them when I head to Tokyo this weekend.

A bottle of Ice Chai

I really like it. It tastes like your typical milk tea with a little bit of cinnamon and and ginger flavor to qualify it as “chai”. I’ll choose this over regular milk tea if given the choice, because I think the spices give it that edge it needs to compete with the standard milk tea brands.

Orange Gatorade

I must admit that I like the minimalist design of the bottle. For now, there seems to be just the “orange” flavor. There’s no indication of a flavor name anywhere on the bottle, so it looks like they’re just trying to establish this as Gatorade itself rather than a multi-flavored brand.

We’ll have to wait and see if it can stand up to the well-established Aquarius and Pocari Sweat.

Straight, Lemon, and Milk tea.

There are three “main” flavors of the tea, and therefore, there are three kinds of cookies. The “Tea Cookie” goes with the Straight Tea, and it looks like a regular cookie to me. The “Lemon Tea Cookie” goes with the Lemon Tea, and it seems to be some sort of sandwich cookie with lemon cream in the middle. Finally, there’s the “Milk Tea Pie” that goes with the Milk Tea, my personal favorite. When they say “pie” in Japan, they mean something more along the lines of a flakey pastry crust and/or cookie and not the baked desserts that I would normally think of.

I'm seeing double!

I just got these, and therefore, I haven’t tried them yet. I’d be a whale by now if I always ate everything as soon as I got it. Good for me, bad for productivity I suppose. Anywho, I’m curious to see what they’re going for with this, as I can see it being one of two possibilities:

1) Each cookie is made to accurately taste like its respective drink, and can be enjoyed alone.

2) Each cookie is made to perfectly compliment its respective drink so in order to get the full experience, you must enjoy the two together.

I’ll make a review post as soon as I find out.

Sakana-kun Chips

The official flavor is “Salted Seaweed”, but it also contains bits of Shrimp and Cod as you can see from Sakana-kun’s fine drawings on the bag.

When I first opened the bag, I got a large whiff of fish smells, but that was only at first. The chips themselves don’t really smell “fishy”, but rather, they just smell like salted chips.

The chips

These are also put out by “Baby Star”, so they are made of the same stuff that the Gyouza Chips were. They didn’t really taste anything like fish, which is good or bad depending on your preferences. It tasted exactly how they advertised it: Salty seaweed. The flavor was simple that of a lightly salted chip with a hint of seaweed, which taste kind of salty themselves. So, if you don’t like your snacks smelling and tasting like the sea, you have nothing to fear here. These chips are about as safe and delightful as Saka-kun himself.

I still really want his hat.

Pepsi Shiso

I had never heard of Shiso before hearing about this, so I have no idea what real Shiso tastes like. The Wikipedia article states that while it’s a member of the mint family, it is not, in fact, a mint. Therefore, it came as no surprise to me that this was not simply mint Pepsi. Pepsi Shiso doesn’t taste like mint at all.

The first thing that came to mind is “herbs”. At certain points while drinking, I could imagine the taste being that of simply grass or leaves, but there was always a little bit extra flavor in there to bring it above such generalizations. It doesn’t taste like tea. It tastes like you walked into the herbal section of a health foods store, so if you like that herbal taste, than you might enjoy this.

My only problem with Pepsi Shiso is that they’re calling it Pepsi, and this isn’t the first time that I’ve made this complaint. With a lot of the other brands such as Coke, Dr Pepper, or Mountain Dew, their flavor variations still retain certain characteristic of the original flavor, but these Pepsi ones always seem to just go off in some random direction. I can’t really say that this tastes like “Pepsi and herbs”, because there’s not really any “Pepsi” in here. It tastes like a carbonated herb drink, yes, but no Pepsi, so I find it odd that they are calling it that. Perhaps they felt like the drink couldn’t stand on its own without relying on some Pepsi brand recognition with a dash of novelty, and I must admit, that I would not just up and buy some other herb flavored drinks if they were sitting right there in shelves next to the other drinks.

Pepsi or not, this is still an interesting drink to try out, but I wonder how much of that interest is simply because of the Pepsi logo on the bottle and not the “Shiso” itself.

2006-2009 Limited Edition Pepsi flavors

It looks like this will be the last Pepsi flavor that I can personally try in Japan without having to get someone to send me a bottle (and paying dearly for it). Whether or not they can be called “Pepsi” is up for debate, but I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of them. Also, yes, my favorite out all of them is the 2008 Pepsi Ice Cucumber. I’m still hoarding a bunch.