11.10.07
Hi-Chew (strawberry)
Hee. Hi-Chew. What the heck is a Hi-Chew? I’ve been wondering about that for quite a while now so I finally grabbed a pack for my JSF stash. When I got back home with my new snack, I found that I already had a pack of Hi-Chew. Apparently I was so excited when I got Hi-Chew the first time that I immediately forgot about it and then bought it again. Well. The neat thing about my apparent strawberry Hi-Chew amnesia is that in the interim Morinaga seems to have repackaged their snacks. Bonus! I mean, I planned it this way. Yeeeeah.
And what is a Hi-Chew? I expected some sort of Starburst like taffy-esque thing with, hopefully, the tasty Japanese strawberry taste. They do smell deliciously strawberry-y (is that a word? It ought to be) and I like the white outer layer around the pink inner layer. That’s fun. They are an odd shape, at least to my taffy and Starburst trained eye, but they stack up so delightfully cute in their package I can learn to adapt to a thinner more oblong taffy bit.
Speaking of taffy…this isn’t quite what I’ve come to expect from taffy. It’s more like a cross between bubblegum and taffy. Hi-Chew is springy and chewy and a little surprising if you happened to go in thinking ‘Starburst’. In fact, it’s a little disturbing with the bouncy chewy if you aren’t expecting it to be. Bubblegum taffy is weird. It’s good though, with a decent middle of the road strawberry taste but lots of it. Plusses for flavor, even if it isn’t fresh strawberry.
Last but not least here’s a bit of history oddness dealing with both Morinaga and rival Japanese confectionary company Glico. The skinny on that, in case you are having a lazy no link-clicky type of day, is way back in 1984 the president of Glico was kidnapped by persons or people calling themselves “The Monster with 21 Faces”. They demanded a ransom, which Glico did not pay, and somewhere in there the president escaped his captivity. The Monster with 21 Faces “forgave” the Glico company and then turned on Morinaga, putting clearly labeled ‘Contaminated with poison’ Morinaga products on the shelves. Then…nothing more. Bizarre!
History lesson over and now I think it’s time to wrap up this review. Morinaga Hi-Chew (strawberry) has a decent yet strong strawberry flavor with a hint of creaminess in there and a cute look. There is the issue of the odd chew, but if you don’t go in with a saltwater taffy state of mine I think it won’t be much of a problem. So to wrap up, the Pigs and I decided on a
Rating of 3.5 wasabi peas out of a possible 5 wasabi peas.
