Tiny grape-shaped frozen sherbet balls with a slightly firm skin and a slushy granular center — Glico's quiet 1980s masterpiece, rebuilt at home from its ingredient list and the science of cold sugar.
Aisu no Mi (literally "ice fruit") launched in 1986. It's the sphere-shaped frozen sherbet you've seen in every Japanese 7-Eleven freezer: a bag of grape-sized purple and green balls, slightly chewy on the outside, a slushy granular center that releases juice when you bite.
The product comes in two grape flavors. Kyoho (巨峰) is the deep purple — tart, intense, the original. Shine Muscat (シャインマスカット) is the pale green — lighter, sweeter, with a floral honeyed note that Japanese viewers go feral for. The texture profile is identical between them; only the juice changes.
You can't replicate it with sugar and grape juice alone. The trick is three sugars, a tiny stabilizer, and a mouthfeel emulsifier. Each does a different job in the cold.
What follows is reverse-engineered from Glico's published ingredient list and professional sorbet science (target sugar concentration 20–30%, stabilizer at 0.2–0.4% of total weight). It won't be identical to the bag from Lawson — Glico flash-freezes at −40 °C, which a home freezer can't match — but it gets you to about 85% of the experience, and the recipe scales beautifully.
The base is identical. Only the juice and a couple of trim ingredients change between purple and green. If you have the molds and the gum, both fit in the same freezer batch.
Deep concord-grape color, the OG flavor. Tart, intense, faintly artificial in the best Asian-grape-candy way. This is the one Glico led with in 1986.
Pale translucent green, lighter and sweeter, with the signature honeyed floral note of the Shine Muscat grape. Add a half-teaspoon of elderflower if your white grape juice is plain.
Pure grape juice freezes too hard. Sugar alone makes it cloying. The Glico version is a calibrated balance of three different sugars, a polysaccharide stabilizer, and a tiny emulsified fat.
Sucrose for sweetness. Glucose syrup adds viscosity and depresses the freezing point. Maltose adds body without sweetness. Together they hit the 20–30% sugar target that gives a slushy, scoopable interior at home-freezer temps.
Pro sorbets use locust bean gum, guar, or xanthan at 0.2–0.4% of total weight. Less than that and the surface is soft and crumbles. More than that and you're chewing rubber. Hydrate it in the dry sugar first or it clumps.
Glico's label reads "vegetable oil, emulsifier." It's not for flavor — it's for the coated, slightly creamy mouthfeel that distinguishes their product from a fruit popsicle. A quarter-teaspoon of neutral oil, blended with a pinch of lecithin, is enough.
Scaled for one cup (240 ml) of juice — about one bag's worth of finished balls. Recipe is by weight; a cheap kitchen scale matters here because the stabilizer dose is small.
| Ingredient | Weight | Volume | % | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% Concord grape juice (Welch's) | 200 g | ~⅞ cup | 78% | Base flavor |
| Granulated sugar (sucrose) | 25 g | 2 tbsp | 10% | Primary sweetener |
| Light corn syrup or glucose syrup | 20 g | 1 tbsp | 8% | Viscosity + freeze depression |
| Maltose syrup (or +5 g corn syrup) | 5 g | ~1 tsp | 2% | Body, no extra sweetness |
| Lemon juice (acidulant) | 3 g | ½ tsp | 1.2% | Brightness |
| Neutral vegetable oil | 1 g | ¼ tsp | 0.4% | Mouthfeel |
| Soy or sunflower lecithin (powder) | 0.5 g | pinch | 0.2% | Emulsifier |
| Xanthan gum (or pectin) | 0.7 g | scant ¼ tsp | 0.3% | Stabilizer — load-bearing |
| Salt | pinch | pinch | — | Sharpens flavor |
| Total base | ~255 g | — | 100% | — |
| Ingredient | Weight | Volume | % | Role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100% white grape juice (Welch's) | 200 g | ~⅞ cup | 78% | Base flavor |
| Granulated sugar (sucrose) | 18 g | 1½ tbsp | 7% | Less than purple — white grape is sweeter |
| Light corn syrup or glucose syrup | 20 g | 1 tbsp | 8% | Viscosity + freeze depression |
| Maltose syrup (or +5 g corn syrup) | 5 g | ~1 tsp | 2% | Body |
| Elderflower cordial (St-Germain works) | 2.5 g | ½ tsp | 1% | The Shine Muscat floral note |
| Lemon juice | 2 g | ⅓ tsp | 0.8% | Lighter touch |
| Citric acid (optional) | ~0.1 g | pinch | — | Bright finish |
| Neutral vegetable oil | 1 g | ¼ tsp | 0.4% | Mouthfeel |
| Soy or sunflower lecithin (powder) | 0.5 g | pinch | 0.2% | Emulsifier |
| Xanthan gum (or pectin) | 0.7 g | scant ¼ tsp | 0.3% | Stabilizer — load-bearing |
| Salt | pinch | pinch | — | Sharpens flavor |
| Total base | ~250 g | — | 100% | — |
Read all the way through before starting — step 5 has a 90-minute checkpoint that's easy to miss if you don't plan around it.
In a small bowl, whisk the xanthan (or pectin) into the granulated sugar until evenly dispersed. The dry sugar particles separate the gum molecules so they hydrate cleanly later instead of clumping into a gel ball.
In a small saucepan, combine the grape juice, corn syrup, maltose, lemon juice, and salt. Heat over medium until just steaming — about 70 °C / 160 °F — but never let it boil. Boiling cooks off the volatile grape aromatics that make this taste like grape and not generic syrup.
Whisk in the sugar/stabilizer mixture in a steady stream, whisking continuously for about 30 seconds. The base will thicken slightly and turn glossy.
Pull the base off the heat and let it cool to room temperature — 20 minutes on the counter, or 8 minutes over an ice bath. Once cool, add the neutral oil and lecithin. Blend with an immersion blender for 30–60 seconds. The mixture should turn slightly opaque and uniform; if you see oil droplets pooling, blend longer.
Pour the base into a squeeze bottle. Fill each silicone sphere cavity to slightly overflowing — surface tension lets the liquid dome up without spilling, which gives you a fuller ball.
Tap the mold firmly on the counter five or six times. Air bubbles rise and pop. Trapped air becomes large ice crystals, which become the gritty, watery patches in a finished ball.
Place the filled molds directly on a chilled metal baking sheet — metal pulls heat out faster than plastic, which gives you smaller crystals and a smoother slush.
Set a timer for 90 minutes. At the buzzer, the surface of each ball should be solid but the interior still soft. Poke each cavity gently with a toothpick and stir the liquid center for two seconds. This is the granita move — it gives you the granular slushy interior the original has, instead of a smooth-frozen one.
Return to the freezer and leave for another 3–4 hours, or overnight.
Let the mold sit at room temperature for 30–60 seconds before unmolding. Don't run it under water — the balls will melt at the surface and lose their skin. Press from the back of each cavity and they should pop out cleanly.
Store in a sealed container with parchment between layers. Best within a week, though they hold for a month if your freezer doesn't fluctuate.
Eat straight from the freezer. You'll get four to six in a sitting, which is roughly one bag of the real thing.
Most failures fall into one of these eight buckets. Click any to expand.
Not enough corn syrup, or your freezer is too cold. Bump corn syrup to 30 g, or move the molds to the upper shelf where temps run a few degrees warmer.
Xanthan or pectin wasn't properly hydrated. Always pre-mix the gum into dry sugar before introducing liquid, and whisk into the base while it's still hot.
Sugar didn't fully dissolve. Heat the base properly in step 2 — until it's steaming and glossy, not just warm.
Stabilizer clumped during hydration. Pass the warm base through a fine sieve before molding, or use an immersion blender at the end to break clumps.
Skipped the salt or the lemon. Both are load-bearing for "punch" — they make the grape read clearly instead of muddy.
Either you used juice with added sugar (read the label — "100% juice" only) or you measured loose. Reduce to 18–20 g of sucrose; the corn syrup is doing the freezing-point work and isn't optional.
Slow freeze, or you skipped the toothpick stir at the 90-minute mark. Use a metal sheet next time; the stir step is what gives you granular slush instead of dense ice.
Lecithin underdosed or under-blended. Bump lecithin to ½ teaspoon and run the immersion blender for a full minute — you should see the base shift to a slightly opaque tone, not just look thinly oiled.
The whole formula is essentially "fruit juice or strained purée + sugars + 0.3% xanthan + the emulsion." Swap the juice; everything else stays close to constant. A few that work especially well:
Japanese grape flavor doesn't taste like American grape flavor. The grapes are different cultivars, the juice formulations are tuned to a different palate, and the candy industry leans on a specific aromatic compound that gives Asian-style grape its signature punch. If you want this to taste like the bag from Lawson — not a generic American grape sorbet — start here.
Japan's most popular table grape, accounting for roughly a third of all grapes grown there. Kyoho is a 1937 hybrid of Concord and Centennial — so American Concord is the closest analog, but it's not identical.
A 2006 Japanese cultivar bred from Muscat parents, now a global luxury fruit. There is no real US juice analog — American "white grape" is mostly Niagara, which doesn't carry the floral muscat note. You'll need to build the flavor.
Three ways to source — pick your authenticity tier below.
From pantry-grade to obsessive-grade. Each tier builds on the previous — you'll always need the equipment column on the right, regardless of how authentic you go on flavor.
Welch's juice, pantry staples, no specialty extracts. Good for testing the technique before investing. Tastes like grape sorbet, not like Aisu no Mi.
Swap the American juices for Japan-imported Kyoho juice and a real Shine Muscat product. Adds the LorAnn grape extract for the Asian-candy note. This is the sweet spot.
Adds the literal compound the Japanese candy industry uses — methyl anthranilate, FCC food-grade — plus direct-from-orchard juice. Diminishing returns past here. The bottle of MA is enough for ~500 batches.
These don't change between tiers — buy once, use forever. The scale is non-negotiable; the stabilizer dose is too small to measure by spoon.
Same base recipe, different juice + extract combinations. Drop the extract amounts by half for the green Shine Muscat version — its profile is more subtle.