Day 232: Today's Pick — Ricola Cherry Honey Throat Drops

It is March in the northern hemisphere. The trees are still bare. There is a faint, low-grade cough in every meeting. The dry indoor air, the lingering tail end of cold and flu season, the months of central heating — all of these are working in concert against your throat. This is the season of the throat drop, and I am here to point you at the best one.

Ricola is a small (well — small-ish, 700-employee, family-owned, publicly traded) Swiss company based in the village of Laufen in the Basel-Country canton, where they have been making herbal cough drops since 1930. The signature Ricola lozenge is a hard-pressed candy made from a blend of thirteen Swiss alpine herbs — peppermint, sage, lemon balm, hyssop, mallow, thyme, marshmallow root, elderberry, yarrow, ribwort plantain, horehound, speedwell, and burnet — sweetened with sugar (or, in the sugar-free version, isomalt), and shaped into a small clear amber lozenge slightly larger than a butterscotch.

The original Ricola flavor — the Original Herb, in the yellow box — is what most people recognize. It is fine. It is medicinal. It tastes faintly like the inside of a tiny Swiss apothecary, which is, of course, exactly what it is.

The flavor I want to make the case for, today, is the Cherry Honey, in the burgundy bag.

The Cherry Honey lozenge takes the same thirteen-herb base and folds in a small, restrained note of black cherry and Swiss wildflower honey. The result is a lozenge that, against the odds, does not taste like medicine. It tastes like a slightly herbal hard candy that you would, in some other context, accept from a kindly aunt. The honey gives it a small softness on the tongue. The cherry gives it a small fruitiness that prevents the herbal blend from leaning too far into "cough syrup." It is, by some distance, the most genuinely pleasant cough drop I have ever sucked on, and I have sucked on a lot of cough drops.

I keep these in approximately seven places.

In my coat pocket, where they live from October to April. In my work bag. In the small inside zip pocket of my carry-on. In a small ceramic bowl on my desk, where they double as a low-stakes social offering when I have meetings (people, mysteriously, love being offered a cough drop; it is the most universally accepted small gift in the office). In the glovebox of my car. In a small dish in my front hallway, where they get grabbed on the way out the door. In the pocket of every coat. The bag is small enough — about 30 lozenges per resealable pouch — that scattering them across multiple pockets is no real economic hardship.

What do I use them for? The standard cough-and-sore-throat applications, of course, but mostly the low-grade applications: a long meeting where the dry conference-room air is starting to scratch; a transatlantic flight where the cabin air will, by hour seven, be a desiccating force; a long phone call where you want a small thing in your mouth that is not coffee. Public speaking. Singing. The first thirty minutes of a movie. An afternoon hike where you've forgotten your water bottle.

A few practical notes. Ricola sells the Cherry Honey in standard 30-piece bags (around $3 in a US drugstore) and in larger 65-piece pouches (around $6). Buy the larger pouch. The cost-per-drop is meaningfully better, and the resealable pouch is sturdy enough to live in a backpack for months. The sugar-free version is functional, but the texture and flavor are slightly compromised; the original-sugar version is the move unless you have a real sugar reason to skip it.

A note on the rest of the lineup. Lemon Mint is the slightly sharper, brighter sibling of Cherry Honey, more "wake up" than "soothe." Honey Lemon with Echinacea is the version with an immune-support claim that I will not endorse, but the lozenge is fine. Original Herb is the classic. Elderflower is a small late addition to the lineup that is, surprisingly, gorgeous — flowery, slightly sweet, summery, an outlier. The Cherry Honey, however, is the everyday workhorse.

A small philosophical note. There is a category of object whose virtue is, mostly, being there. A Ricola in your pocket is not impressive. A Ricola in your pocket when you need a Ricola is, briefly, a small triumph. Stocking your life with these tiny on-hand pleasures is a quiet form of taking care of yourself — and, by extension, the people around you.

This has been Day 232. The pick costs about a dime. Buy a bag. Put one in every coat.