Meiji Cola Up Gummy Candy

Every gummy in Japan — every shari-crunch novelty, every juice-packed premium cube, every texture experiment on the convenience store shelf — descends from this one.

Cola Up, launched by Meiji in 1980, was Japan’s first gummy candy, the product that introduced an entire nation to the category it would eventually perfect.

The original ran for years, disappeared, and returned in 2008 in its current form: a glossy, translucent gummy molded as a miniature cola bottle, engineered to a hardness that has become its calling card.

And it is genuinely hard. Across a hundred receipt-verified Japanese reviews, the same word repeats — hado, hard — with affectionate warnings that these demand real chewing, that a few pieces are satisfying in a way soft gummies never are, and that the effort is the pleasure.

In a market Meiji itself helped split into soft and hard camps, Cola Up anchors the hard end.

The flavor honors the bottle.

Reviewers consistently describe it as unmistakably, faithfully cola — the sweet, spiced, faintly citrus profile of the classic soft drink, concentrated enough that chewing one feels like drinking the real thing, some even catching a trace of the drink’s shuwa-shuwa fizz.

It is a nostalgia flavor delivered without irony: several longtime fans simply note it tastes the way it always has.

Against the famous imported bears it inevitably invites comparison with, Japanese reviewers give Cola Up the edge on chew, flavor concentration, and value — a 100-gram bag from the country’s most trusted confectioner, available everywhere from convenience stores to drugstores, and now here.

Forty-plus years on, the first Japanese gummy is still the standard-issue answer to a specific craving: cola you can bite.

About this item
Item Name : Cola Up
Brand : Meiji
Item Form : Gummy Candy
Number of Items : 100g (Pack of 1)