Meiji Banana Choco — Sugar-Shelled Banana Chocolate, 37g

Small banana-shaped pieces with a hard sugar shell over soft chocolate: you crunch through the shell first, and the shell is where the banana flavour sits. That shell is also why this one handles a warm bag better than ordinary chocolate does. The box itself folds into a banana, which is aimed squarely at children and works on most adults too.

バナナチョコ, the name on the box, if you're matching it to something you saw in Japan.

What you're getting

• Taste: Faint banana rather than a strong one, over plain sweet chocolate. There is real banana in it: banana powder is in the ingredients, and banana is a declared allergen, which flavouring alone would never trigger, but there's added flavouring and colour in there as well. Several people who say they don't like banana eat these anyway.
• Texture: A crisp shell that cracks, then soft chocolate. If you know Smarties or M&Ms, that is the construction, and Japanese reviewers reach for Meiji's own Marble Chocolate to describe it.
• It travels: The sugar shell means it stands up to a warm bag and doesn't mark your hands the way loose chocolate does. It is still chocolate, though: the maker's line is to keep it below 28°C, so treat it as hard-wearing rather than heatproof.
• The box is a toy: Take off the film, trace along the dotted lines with a pen and squeeze the carton into a banana shape. It doesn't say whether you're meant to empty the box first.
• Worth knowing what it is: cocoa is the second ingredient and vegetable fat only the fifth, so it is more cocoa-forward than it looks.
• Allergens: contains egg, milk, soy and banana. Australia's allergen chart has no banana category, so banana cannot appear in the pack's allergen box here — check the ingredients, not the chart; ours is the fuller list.
• Allergens, one more: there is gelatine in it too. Not an allergen, but named outright on Meiji's list, so it isn't vegetarian and there's no halal claim on it. The list doesn't say what animal it comes from.

A few things worth knowing. It has not been discontinued: that rumour is a mix-up with a Meiji ice cream of almost the same name that ended in 2026, and this box is still in Meiji's current line-up. It is also not choco-banana, the whole banana on a stick sold at Japanese summer festivals; that is the commonest mix-up in both languages. If you remember colourful pieces inside, your memory is right and the box has changed. It is one colour now. And if you remember a bigger box, that is right too: it used to be 42 g.

It's a small box, the sort of thing that rides along with a bigger order rather than travelling on its own.