Name: Meiji Lucky Stick
Origin: Indonesia
Found at: Freshia, Tustin
Cost: $1.99
Ingredients:
Wheat flour, Sugar, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Palm Oil), Skim Milk Powder, Non-hydrogenated Shortening (Palm Oil), Condensed Milk, Whole Milk Pwder, Cocoa Powder, Lactose, Malt Extract, Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Coffee, Artificial Chocolate and Cappuccino Flavor, Natural Vanilla Flavor, Emulsifier (Soy Lecithin, Sucrose Esters of Fatty Acids), Salt.
Why I Bought It:
What does this remind you of? Does it initiate a certain Pavlolian response from you nicotine junkies? If the name and font choice doesn't already bear a striking (pun intended) resemblance to Lucky Strike, there's the product itself: it looks exactly like cigs.
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Tasting Notes:
It's thicker than conventional Pocky, and very intensely coffee-flavored. Appropriate then that it was made in the island of Java. Caffeine addicts would clamor for these things. A few sticks made me wired for hours, although I did drink it with tea, so it's inconclusive which one really did the job.
Either way, I'm not sure that such a snack would be appropriate for children. You should probably stick with (pun intended again) buying them regular chocolate-covered Pocky. Plus you wouldn't want impressionable minds to associate these snacks to packs of cigarettes. It's a short leap from caffeine to nicotine, especially when this product seems to visually bridge that gap.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.