Morinaga in Jelly Energy Lemon Salt Plus — 180g

A 180 g pouch of lemon jelly you drink through the spout rather than spoon. It is mild rather than sharp: a clean, lightly sweet lemon that Japanese drinkers most often compare to honey-lemon, and although the pack leads on its salt, almost nobody can taste it. This is the silver pouch with the lemon on the front, and in Japan it only comes out in summer.

On the pack: inゼリー エネルギー レモン塩分＋ (in zerii enerugii remon enbun purasu). Look for the big yellow lemon on a silver pouch. Enbun means salt content, which is what the plus sign is about.

What you're getting

• A lemon that is deliberately easy rather than tart. First-timers keep saying the same thing: they expected sour and it wasn't. Several drinkers wish it were more lemony, which tells you where on the scale it actually sits.
• The surprise: you are unlikely to taste the salt. Across fifty-odd Japanese reviews not one person described it as salty, and the few who mention the salt at all say they can barely detect it. What they describe instead is a faint sweet-salty edge, closer to honey-lemon than to anything sporty.
• Set with agar, and reformulated in 2021 specifically to be easier to swallow. It goes down smoothly, one Japanese drinker with a throat too sore to manage water said this was the only thing that would go down.
• Drink it cold, and this is not generic advice. Three Japanese drinkers independently report that the sourness simply disappears when it is chilled and drunk after sweating; one complained his convenience-store fridge hadn't got it cold enough.
• The honest caveat: it is a sweet drink, and the people who dislike it split two ways, some want much more lemon, and a few found it too sour at the very moment they wanted it, when they were already worn out and overheated.
• 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.

Two things worth being straight about. In Japan this is sold as a summer product and the front of the pack carries a line about a heatstroke-awareness campaign. That is Morinaga sponsoring a public-information project, not a claim about what the pouch does. Morinaga's own page is careful in the same way, and adds that this product alone is not adequate fluid and salt. It is not a rehydration drink and it is not a substitute for one. It is a nice cold lemon jelly for a hot day.

Two more, since this range confuses people even in Japan. There is a separate frozen pouch also called Salt Plus, and it is a different product: 150 g, lychee, made to be frozen. This is the 180 g lemon one. And if you have seen the blue pouch: that is the plain Energy one, muscat-flavoured, with no salt and no lemon. Same size, same price, different drink. Japanese buyers tend to reach for the blue one year-round and this one in summer.