Fruity Pocky - Amazon

Fruity Pocky - Amazon

I leave for the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York TOMORROW! Am I prepared? Well...

Professional food blogger business cards? Check! My fancy new Media Kit (which took me all night to finish)? Check! Clothes and luggage packed? ....kind of? Food reviews queue up for YouTube and the blog? . . . .

I still have a LOT to do before I leave, but I'm doing my best to knock all of that out today, plus this way I can take care of a few more products in my food stash. Win win! For today's post I have some fancy Pocky I bought online. I usually refrain from buying food stuff on Amazon because it never arrives in one piece. Even though the seller packaged these with lots of bubble wrap and FRAGILE stickers...the strawberry box is still a little worse for wear. But hey, even if it's in pieces it'd still edible! Let's see if these fancy foreign Pocky taste any different than the Japanese versions.

The boxes are smaller and squarer than typical Pocky boxes, and the text at the very top is embossed with a lovely metallic silver. These Fruity versions have a more mature look than a lot of other Pocky flavors, but it's still pretty nice, although the high gloss black packaging does make it feel a little cheap. (I personally think a matte finish looks a lot more expensive and it feels really nice in-hand.) 

Can you read any of this? I sure can't. Unlike the other boxes of Pocky I buy at the Asian Food Market, these do not have a translated ingredients sticker, but both of these items are pretty straight forward and I can't imagine that they deviate from the usual Pocky ingredients all that much.

I opened up the strawberry flavored Pocky first. Inside the box is a lovely golden foiled bag, which is a nice contrast to the silver text on the outside of the box, and it features the same all-over print logo as all other flavors of Pocky.

I opened the plastic and the biscuit sticks were surprisingly intact! It's a food blogging miracle! The box may have been smashed, but the cookies survived!

Once out of the package I can see that the coating on these sticks is darker, a bit thicker, and less uniform than the Japanese variety, but that could be part of the "fruity" branding. It looks different than the Japanese one, but it has the same strawberry and white chocolate yogurt aroma that I'm used to. I'm thinking this might taste exactly the same, and buying these on Amazon might have been a little impulsive...oh well. Time to find out if these were worth buying!

I took a bite, and they're different, but not in a good way. The coating feels waxier on the tongue than usual, and the overall flavoring is just...off. Not in a really drastic or significant way, but if I didn't know any better, I'd say these were knock-off Pocky. They're real alright, they're just not made in Japan, and even though the overall aroma and flavor profile are really similar, this one is pretty...sad. Sad is the best way I can put it. I gave some of these to my boyfriend and my sister without telling them anything about where it's from, and they agreed that it wasn't as fresh and flavorful as usual Pocky. (They thought it might be old and stale, which could be the case. I can't read these boxes so who knows when they were produced.) 

When it comes to the Strawberry, the Japanese version is better, but what about blueberry? I haven't had a Japanese blueberry Pocky before, since I have no basis of comparison for this one maybe it'll taste better. 

Once opened, the blueberry Pocky sticks smells sweet and yogurt-heavy, like the strawberry, but the fruity aroma mixed in there is a little jammy with a few deeper berry notes which are pleasant. It's not perfect, but it's better than a Chapstick or Bath and Body Works candle.

The coating is the same, thicker, imperfect layer with blueberry bits mixed in, although this one isn't as bumpy, and it tastes...better than I thought it would. I think I like this one more because I really have no basis of comparison, but still, it's pretty nice. The flavoring is a little waxy and yogurt-heavy, like the coating on raisins and trail mix, but the fruity flavoring is a bit jammer and more complex than the strawberry. It's not a flavor I would immediately pin-point as being blueberry, but it's definitely a berry of some kind. I wouldn't buy it again, but I do think this one is superior to the strawberry. I shared some with my sister and boyfriend and even though my sister was pretty "meh" about this one, my boyfriend liked this one a lot more. 

Overall, I think these made for an interesting post, but I kinda regret buying them. They were different from Japanese Pocky, but not in a good way. (Plus the boxes got smashed. ;_; ) I can't say I would recommend buying either one of these, but it did make me want to seek of a Japanese blueberry Pocky, so I'll have to keep my eye out for that in the future.

© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net

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