One thing about being marooned in the States is that it becomes increasingly more difficult to sample and enjoy the various flavored Kit Kat from Japan. I’m either at the mercy of local importer/supermarket Uwajimaya, or, as the case is now, they need to be sent to me. Fortunately, a box of nine to ten different flavors of Kit Kat was just sent to me by my wonderful girlfriend, so, I have more Kit Kat to try, eat and enjoy.

One of these flavours was ミックスジュース, or Mixed Juice. Some background on this flavor: Mixed Juice is, to think of it in U.S. terms, fruit punch (though often served like a smoothie). However, Japanese fruit punch is considerably different than fruit punch stateside. Unlike Hawaiian punch (see “fruit drank“), Mixed Juice actually tastes like fruit. The choice of fruit is much different also. Commonly used are strawberries, bananas and peaches.

Moving on to the Kit Kat itself (or the packaging, rather), it has the traditional Kit Kat brand, with simply drawn vector peaches, strawberries and bananas as wells a glass of mixed juice with straw, and a scary doll like girl enjoying a sip of mixed juice. As you might expect, it’s very colorful (ミックスジュース being rainbow colored). It’s nothing special, but plays more for a younger audience and at least gets the point across. You know (or, you hope you know) what flavors will be in the Kit Kat and what it will taste like.

Individually wrapped minis.

I enjoyed the wrapping of the individual mini-fingers quite a bit more. The wrapper is a soft canary color, with one color vector fruit, and two color vector glass of juice. This brand just seemed more together and solid.

Admittedly, the fruit flavored Kit Kat can be a real hit or miss bunch. Some are really good, some are not so good, and some are just bizarre and Nestle will keep making strawberry flavored Kit Kat until they get it right. Honestly, I wasn’t too sure about Mixed Juice. In my experience when they try to mix multiple flavors that don’t really lend themselves to chocolate into a chocolate snack, it’s a bit unfocused and disastrous.

Upon cracking the wrapper, I was greeted with a really pleasant smell reminiscent of fruit cocktail. I don’t know how many people out there eat fruit cocktail, but there was a  time and a place where I would eat can after can of fruit cocktail. It was a pleasant surprise.

The fingers are an unnatural tangerine or mango color orange made with white chocolate and definitely smell EXACTLY like fruit cocktail. The interior wafers are sadly, just a solid, plain wafer brown.

When first bit into, the fruit cocktail greeting is still heavily noticeable, but quickly disappears under and overwhelming peach flavors, which is very peachy and quite nice. That initial burst of peach is then replaced with banana at the end, and the white chocolate gives the whole thing a nice banana milk finish (if you’ve ever had the Nesquick banana milk, that is, not the Korean variety). What was absent was definitely the strawberry, except for a SMALL touch of tartness at the end, I guess. Nestle still doesn’t seem to know what to do with strawberry. Regardless, the milky combination of peach and banana was enjoyable and reminds of a smoothie. Not bad by any means. I didn’t miss the strawberries, really. Due to the “chocolate” being white, these small Kit Kat are considerably sweeter than a smoothie. While eating them, I didn’t feel the sweetness too much (to its credit) but after finishing, it definitely felt like I’d gotten enough sugar.

Overall, I enjoyed these as a fruit smoothie Kit Kat.

Flavor: 6/10

Presentation: 4/10

Packaging: 4/10