Morinaga in Jelly Energy Glucose Ramune — 180g

A 180 g pouch of ramune-flavoured jelly you drink through the spout rather than spoon. Ramune here is the flavour, not the fizz: it tastes like the chalky lemon-lime sweet rather than the marble-stoppered soda, and it is sweet, clean and thinner than you would expect a jelly to be. This is the teal pouch in Morinaga's in Jelly range.

On the pack: inゼリー エネルギーブドウ糖 (in zerii enerugii budoutou). One word is worth decoding before you order. Budoutou looks and sounds as though it ought to mean grape, and it doesn't. It means glucose. There is no fruit juice in this pouch at all.

What you're getting

• Ramune flavour, which in Japan means the lemon-lime taste shared by a soda and a chalky pressed sweet. Several Japanese drinkers call it their favourite in the whole in Jelly range; one describes it simply as tasting like eating ramune sweets.
• Not carbonated. There is no fizz in it at all. If you were expecting the soda in jelly form, this isn't that.
• Set with agar rather than the thicker base the muscat pouch uses, so it runs looser than that one and drinks more than it chews. One person describes the feel as sitting exactly midway between drinking and eating: you're drinking it, but your stomach registers food.
• The honest caveat, and there are two. It is sweet: glucose is the main ingredient and too sweet is the most common complaint Japanese drinkers make about it. And some drinkers report it makes them drowsy, including the Japanese student whose post about it briefly went round the internet, who spent the same day warning people to try it beforehand rather than on the day.
• Allergens: Morinaga declares none of Japan's twenty-eight named allergen categories in this product, gelatine included. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

One thing we're leaving alone. Morinaga markets this in Japan as energy for thinking, and it had a moment among students during Japan's national entrance exams in January 2024, but that is what the Japanese pack says, not a claim we're making, and its own drinkers disagree about whether it does anything at all. Separately, if you're choosing between pouches: the blue one is the standard Energy, muscat-flavoured, and this teal one is the glucose one.

Ramune is the flavour here, borrowed from the drink. If you have wondered what that bottle with the marble in the neck actually is, our guide Ramune: the Japanese soda with a marble stuck in the bottle explains where the name came from and why it ended up on sweets and jellies as well as soda.