Jarritos Mandarin

The boys and I stopped at Cub Foods 2 days ago (we rarely do because we are more of an "Aldi" family) for some ingredients for some Thai chicken, and we found a Jarritos that we hadn't tried yet:

Brand: Jarritos Mandarin.

Origin: El Paso, TX.

Purchase Place: Cub Foods, Minneapolis, MN.

Sweetener: Sugar.

Review: This had a true "kick" of mandarin orange - it was not just a regular orange soda. And I don't know that I cared for it that much. You know the difference between an "orange" and an "orange cream" soda? Well, take that difference and make an orange soda with more of a bite than creaminess, and you'd have this soda. True that it has an appropriate mandarin kick, but it's just not something that I liked all that much. I'll rate this just below average.

Score: 4 out of 10.

Hapi Mandarin Orange Float Drink

This past weekend, I needed to make a last-minute stop at Cub Foods, and I spotted this while I was there:

It's not "technically" a soda, but it's sweetened with HFCS, so I figured it'd be kinda like a soda. It wasn't.


Brand: Hapi Mandarin Orange Float Drink.

Origin: Korea.

Purchase Place: Cub Foods, St. Paul, MN.

Sweetener: High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Review: Well, it tasted like mandarin oranges and it had small chunks of them in it. So that seems about right. But it was kinda gross. It was like bad tasting OJ. The "mandarin orange" flavor was right on (the 2nd ingredient is "mandarin orange pulp" and the 4th is "mandarin orange concentrate"), but it just wasn't good.

Score: 3 out of 10.