There's nothing like a controversial food to split marriages and divide nations. Cast your vote for dishes you can't stomach.
Meiji's sweets gum: Double caramel
Caramel-flavored gum that tastes like caramel but chews like gum. The horror. The chewy, chewy, chewy, chewy, chewy horror
The packaging shows a rich buttery caramel being covered with a darker caramel, yet it's chewing gum.Individually wrapped caramel candies are a staple of Japanese convenience stores -- presumably leading the product development geniuses at Meiji confectionary to conclude that individually wrapped caramels might also function as another Quickie Mart favorite -- chewing gum. Thus was Sweets Gum: Double Caramel born.
Most new products in Snack Nation tend to exist on the 'crazy' spectrum -- if not always exceptional, at least interesting -- but Sweets Gum is both unimaginative and bad.
Meiji has saddled all the goodness of its rich caramels with the inherent handicap of the gum medium. Imagine popping a nice melty caramel in your mouth and chewing ... and chewing ... and chewing ... until all that's left is a stale flavorless mess of hardened carpenter's putty. To paraphrase Charlie Sheen, you don't buy caramels for the taste, you buy them to dissolve.
No disrespect to this candy classic, but caramel does not make a good gum flavor. Minty or fruity gums work as palate cleansers. Double caramel gum simply makes you reach for one of those flavors in order to get the permanent taste of flan out of your mouth.
Vital statsSweets Gum: Double Caramel
Price: ¥120
Maximum chew time: Under five minutes
Desire to chew another piece afterward: Very low
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