Morinaga in Jelly Energy — Muscat Jelly Drink, 180g

The blue pouch every Japanese convenience store carries: muscat grape jelly you drink through a spout, no spoon and no chewing. It tastes like clean grape jelly, closer to a green grape than the purple sort, and it isn't very sweet to taste. One thing to get straight before you buy: this is the energy one, not one of the sugar-free konjac jellies it looks like on a supermarket shelf. The pouch carries 753 kJ (180 kcal), the figure printed on the front, and what the product is sold as, and tasting mild is not the same as being light.

Japanese pack: inゼリー エネルギー (in-zerii enerugii). Older packs and older listings say ウイダーinゼリー, Weider in Jelly, same product, renamed in March 2018 when Morinaga dropped the licensed Weider name. And this is Morinaga & Co., the confectionery company; not Morinaga Milk, which is a different business entirely.

What you're getting

• Muscat, which is the line's default: light and clean, with 3% real juice in it. A supermarket staple in Japan rather than a specialist sports product.
• Somewhere between a drink and a jelly: thin enough to swallow without chewing, thick enough that it doesn't feel like drinking water. The spout is small, so you can drink it lying down, and it is a thing Japanese households keep for whoever is ill and can't face food.
• One hand, no spoon, gone in a mouthful: which is why it lives in school bags and gym bags.
• Try one before you stock up: it's a clean, not-too-sweet grape, but plenty of people get a faintly medicinal note off it, and have done for years. It's a taste worth meeting once.
• It won't fill you up, and it isn't meant to: Morinaga's own comparison is about one onigiri's worth of energy. Treat it as the thing that gets you to lunch, not as lunch.
• Allergens: Morinaga declares none of Japan's mandatory or recommended allergen categories for this product. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

A few things worth knowing. One pouch is one serve: twist, drink, done. There is no caffeine in it; the energy is carbohydrate. Don't freeze it: Morinaga's own advice is that freezing leaves the nutrition broadly alone but wrecks the jelly texture permanently, and it thaws watery rather than setting again, chill it instead. If you are buying it to run on, weigh it up honestly: 180 g in a pocket is a lot to carry next to a purpose-made running gel. And if you go hunting for the rest of the range, this blue pouch is the Energy one. Multivitamin, Multimineral and Protein are separate products in near-identical pouches, so check the word on the front.