When I bought this, I was under the impression that it was something akin to Pocky, as in a pretzel stick with chocolate and the flavours were watermelon and lemon. How wrong was I.
It's actually stick candy with those flavours but no chocolate, just candy. Still, I'm challenging myself with this menu so here goes.
I was surprised to find that there were 6 individual packets inside, 3 each of watermelon soda and lemon soda. Each pack has 2 sticks inside.
Each stick is about 10cm long and half a centimetre in diameter. The sticks have a glossy finish.
The watermelon flavoured candy stick is pink with black dots throughout. The lemon one also has a few pips included and this is because it's a kind of watermelon theme. Both packets look like watermelon, they both have the pips, but the lemon one is yellow. There is a play on words going on as this is called "sui-karipori" and a watermelon is "suika".
Both sticks smell similar to their fruity counterparts. When broken in half the sticks deliver a loud crunch noise, hence the name, "karipori".
At first the candy feels like sucking on plastic, but then I get a sense of "fizziness". The candy dissolves in my mouth but I much more prefer crunching on it which enhances the fizz.
The watermelon flavour is pretty good, but with all the fizz ends up having a weird chemical taste at the end. The lemon really tastes like sour lemons, down to the sour part, and I found the fizz was less intense, and the flavour was sweeter at the end.
I like the lemon flavour more because I hate candy that tastes weird like chemicals.
It's not something I would usually buy, and I probably wouldn't buy it again, but only because this sort of thing is not my cup of tea. I like the idea and I'm sure kids would love this. If I had kids I would probably buy it for them.
