Sugar Cane Juice (Pinoy Foods, Birmingham Indoor Market) [By @SpectreUK]

My dad always regales us with sugar cane anecdotes of when he was a child living for a few years in Trinidad. He used to cut sugar cane in the field near his home there with a big sickle and eat all the sugar inside the cane. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t miss these anecdotes for the world, especially when he talks of seeing an anaconda stretch from one side of a river to the other when he was on a canoe one time. I just wish he’d leave the part out where he cut the top off his thumb’s knuckle one time with the sickle! Anyway, it was this story I had in mind when I saw this can of Sugar Cane Juice in one of my favourite Foodstuff Find’s haunts in Birmingham.

I’m not sure what the “FOCO” stands for on the front of the can, but I tried not to take it as an insult.
Manufactured by the Thai Agri Foods Public Company Limited, which Cinabar stated “Food Company” could be where the “FO” for Food and “CO” for Company came from. Ingredients in the 350ml can were; water, sugar cane juice (35%), sugar (just in case there wasn’t enough sugar in the sugar cane juice) and citric acid. Per 100ml there was 42 calories, which I was quite surprised at how low this amount was considering the title of the drink, 0g of fat and 10.2g of sugar. Sugar Cane Juice sounded like it was going to be a sweet drink. I was not to be disappointed. Adding further sugar to the already pretty damn sugary ingredients was like adding insult to injury. To say that this drink was sweet would be an underestimation. The drink had a cloudy lemonade colour to it without the fizz and a sugar cane plant smell. The sugar sweetness had a mild woody cane taste that made the initial flavour quite unpleasant. Oh, but the aftertaste... Once I’d got through the fairly nasty sweet plant flavour there was a lovely sugar sweet aftertaste that I didn’t want to leave my mouth, like I’d just stolen some sugar cubes from the coffee table as a child. Having said that, I don’t think I’d run out and buy another can in a hurry. I’ll just nick the sugar cubes...

By Spectre