Morinaga in Jelly Energy Muscat Jelly Drink 180g

The blue pouch you'll find in Japanese convenience stores: 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 (the near-zero-calorie diet pouches) 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 Weider name, which it had licensed from the American Weider company since 1983. 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. It is the thing Japanese households keep for whoever is ill and can't face food: people say they can drink it lying down.
• One hand, no spoon, gone in seconds: 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 the energy of one rice ball (onigiri). Treat it as the thing that gets you to lunch, not as lunch.
• Allergens: Morinaga declares none of Japan's twenty-eight named allergen categories in this product, gelatine included. Our list follows the maker's own Japanese label.

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, and the texture does not come back when it thaws. Chilling it is what plenty of people in Japan do 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, Multi Mineral and Glucose Ramune are separate products in near-identical pouches, so check the word on the front.