Yeo's Asian Juice Boxes: Sugar Cane and Snow Pear

I'm starting to look into eating and drinking a little healthier these days. Don't worry, I'll still inject possibly toxic liquids down my gullet once(ish) a week for my five fans, but I'm looking at some non-soda substitutes in my daily routine. And since Asia has never let me down (that's a goddamn lie) and juice boxes have always appealed to my slimmer inner-child, then why not wind down this Thursday with some exotic Asian juice boxes? What could possibly.........

Ah, Yeo's. Singapore's finest beverage company with such classics as Longan Red Date Drink, Bandung Rose Syrup Milk Drink, Cheng Bou Leong and so many other classics that have graced our refrigerator for generations. Actually, these all seem like flavors of stupid that I'll eventually spend way too much money to try. The website also offers a "cool" tile game that I can't figure out and a "fresh" Yeo's Screen Saver! Party to the MAX. Several of the Asian drinks sitting in my fridge come from this company, but I've never heard of them until today. My two treats this evening are, I'm assuming, juice boxes not marketed to kids with the tag line: "The Natural Choice." Besides the recent Ecto Cooler, I don't think I've had a juice box in 15 years, so let's get our SingaPOUR on! GET IT!!!! It doesn't even make sense because it's a juice box and you drink from a straw and I suck at tile games and punctuation%

Sugar Cane Drink
Now here's an odd thing, pretty much everything I've eaten over the last 30 years contain some type of sugar, but I've never really seen a sugar cane in real life, and I've certainly, to the best of my knowledge, never tasted one. Sugar cane produces sugar, so is this to just literally be sugar water? I can make that at home Macgyver style without all this fancy Asian lettering. Let's read the ingredients: Water, sugar cane extract, cane sugar and caramel." Wait, wait, wait. You have a drink where the main ingredient is literal sugar, and you've added an additional flavor of...sugar? Well I'm probably in for a sweet treat as this little 8.5 oz box contains 7% of my daily carbohydrates. I'm definitely going to have to go stare at the gym after this.
So I opened up the straw, poked it in and tried to smell it by giving it a little squeeze and it literally went up my nose. I wish I was kidding. Can't smell anything since it's in a juice box so I guess I'll go right for the taste. Yea I'd say it's pretty much sugar water. There is a slight herbal flavor to it, but it's basically just really, really sweet water. Singapore kids probably move it. Singaporians?

Snow Pear Drink

Lots of helpful info here...

I can't say I've heard of a snow pear before. Lazy research tells me it's popular in western Asia and has a sour, mild taste. The ingredients are a little more extravagant for this one: water, extract of dried pear, dried mandarin orange, apricot kernal (it's in bold on the box; no idea why), bei sha shen, chaun bei mu, cane sugar, artificial flavor and caramel. So they're just messing with me at this point right? If there's no English translation for one of your ingredients, either leave it off the list or make something up. And WHY is apricot kernal in bold? It makes no sense to me. Just like the last drink, there's really no scent past the cardboard, so for the first time in my life, I assume, let's drink something with bei sha shen in it.


It's identical to the sugar cane drink. I mean identical. It may say it has different ingredients and different nutritional facts, but if you did the Pepsi taste challenge with these two drinks, no one would be able to tell them apart. Well this has been a giant waste of time, and I probably have apricot kernal poisoning. I'm going to go sit on the toilet for six hours and try and figure out that tile game. So long everyone.

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