TokyoTreat box of Japanese snacks and candies has had an upgrade, and is now bigger and better!
You can read more about it here, but this is the jist of it:
They’ve gotten rid of the Small box, reduced the dagashi numbers, and added a kinosei and anime snack. It’s now snack-only, no bonus non-snack item in the premium box. Also they’ve gotten rid of the small box so there are now just two box sizes.
Premium: $35 per month containing 17 items: 5 popular Japanese snacks, 1 party pack, 4 share packs, 3 dagashi, 1 anime snack, 1 DIY candy kit, 1 kinosei snack, 1 Japanese drink.
Classic $25 per month containing 12 items: 4 popular Japanese snacks, 4 share packs, 2 dagashi, 1 DIY candy kit, 1 kinosei snack.
They’ve also tweaked their branding a little bit, and the box has had a redesign.
It’s still the same colour and size, but there are different pictures on the side, and the top logo is a little different. (There’s a picture here if you want to make a comparison.)
Here’s a big change: a leaflet instead of the previous menu booklet.
A bit of blurb about the new box, plus now the item list is online. You go to the website and put in a password.
Their new online magazine includes a full list of the contents, including descriptions, plus details of this month’s social media photo contest, instructions for the DIY candy kit, details of the month’s giveaway, and their new refer-a-friend program.
Anyway, time to take a look inside the box itself.
Umaibo is a great place to start! This Umaibo (a yummy crunchy puffed corn tube snack) is Corn Potage Flavour. This is one of their regular flavours, but it comes in this cute Christmas packaging!
Shimi Choco Corn, little crispy corn puffs covered in chocolate, is a popular snack in Japan. This version is strawberry flavour! They are sweet and creamy and very strawberry-y.
Staying with strawberry for a moment, these are Wild Strawberry Trail Hard Candies, known as Noichigo no Komichi in Japan. The package is resealable, which is great for portion control, but takes away the excuse to eat them all at once! I’m slightly flummoxed by the picture on the package, because it looks like raspberries to me, but no matter, they taste good.
Moving to more savory, these are Koikeya Savory Salt Seaweed Potato Chips. You know nori, the green stuff sometimes wrapped around sushi? Well, that is the kind of seaweed they mean. They don’t exactly taste of seaweed, but they definitely have more depth of flavour than regular salted crisps.
Chocobi is the favourite snack of the manga character Crayon Shin-chan!
Grape Chocobi are crunchy corn snacks in grape flavour, which represents Autumn in Japan.
These little star-shaped crunchies are extremely delicious. You can eat them straight out of the box, chill them in the fridge, or even like cereal with milk!
There is also a bonus Shin-chan sticker inside the box.
Now, technically these Dondon Yaki Kimchi Rice Cakes are Korean rather than Japanese. But I think they can be considered honorary Japanese snacks for this purpose. Apparently they are very tasty and have a wonderful distinctive kimchi taste. Unfortunately I can’t tell you for sure because I can’t eat them (kimchi often contains shellfish and I’m allergic.) However I can tell you my beautiful Anglo-Japanese best friend absolutely adores them, and I trust her judgement on all things Eastern.
Kameda Seika Happy Turn Rice Crackers is the ‘sharing pack’ referred to in the description, and come in this joined up pack of four bags to share. (Of course, you don’t have to share if you don’t want to.) They are very light and crunchy, and have a definite combination of sweet and salty taste. The individual packs are great for portion control, and the packaging is incredibly appropriate for the name. Look at all those happy faces!
This month’s DIY Candy Kit is a Puchi Puchi Art or Sherbet DIY Kit. This version is the Art Kit, where you mix various liquids to make little gummy darts and then get all artistic with the designs.
The instructions are on the website, which I’m pretty glad about, because this one looks more complicated than usual!
Every TokyoTreat box now contains a kinosei snack.
This month’s kinosei is Lotte Memory-Enhancing Gum. It contains ginkgo biloba extract, which is a herbal supplement used in Chinese medicine and apparently has memory-boosting properties.
While I can’t really vouch for its efficacy, it does taste very minty, and the flavour lasts a long time.
This month’s anime snack is a Pokémon Gummy and Moonlight Series Card. It contains a gummy shaped like a Pokéball, and for collectors, a trading card from the newest Pokémon TGC Moonlight Series.
Here’s another largeish bag, this time Koikeya Scone Japanese BBQ. These crunchy corn sticks are like BBQ flavour but with a Japanese twist. Savory and tasty. They rather remind me of Nik Naks, which I used to adore as a child.
Sour Cider Paper Candy is a kind of thin gummy candy, very thin like paper. The flavour is sour cider, which I don’t really understand, but I’d definitely say it’s on the sweet side of sour. This candy is made by Yaokin, which produces and distributes an enormous range of Japanese candy and snacks, including my beloved Umaibo.
Forget the boring orange soda you get in the UK, Japanese Fanta is on another level. There are around 90 (yep, 90) different flavours, often seasonal specialties, including melon, grape, and peach.
This month’s drink is Premium Pear Fanta. It’s lovely and refreshing, and the pear taste is remarkably strong.
I’ve saved my favourite item for last. This is Rich Matcha KitKat Party Pack, which is a bag of miniature two-finger KitKats in delicious matcha tea flavour. Like Fanta, Japanese KitKats come in all kinds of weird and wonderful flavours, and matcha is one of the best.
They are sweet, but not sickly, and the matcha flavour comes through beautifully. They are also a rather beautiful pale green colour. Don’t worry, they taste far too good for the colour to be off-putting. Little C is especially fond of these, which is why I have to hide them.
If you’re curious about the different varieties, take a look here.
That’s the lot!
Now then, thoughts on the new-style TokyoTreat.
First of all, I’m going to get my minor griping out of the way…
I really miss the menu booklet. Like YumeTwins (which is part of the TokyoTreat group), they have replaced their lovely booklet with the flyer and put everything online. Yes, I understand that it is cheaper to produce a flyer, so more money for snacks. But it means there is no longer all the extra information the booklet contained, such as interesting facts about Japanese culture. I really appreciated that, not only because it was useful stuff to think about for our planned trip to Japan, but it made me feel like I was learning a little something too. So I’m sad about that.
I think it would be helpful for the items on the online menu to be labelled with their different categories. I can pretty much guess which ones the dagashi are, but that’s because I’ve seen quite a few Japanese snacks by now! But I think for someone who was not familiar with the different types, knowing which thing is which would be very useful.
OK, enough whining.
It’s terrific they’ve nailed down a specific number of snacks (17), and there are now fewer dagashi; three instead of five. I love that they’re including a party bag of little snacks, such as the KitKats, and I really hope we’ll be seeing some more of the crazy flavours!
It looks like they’ve abandoned their themes. I’m not worried about that, as only a few snacks were specifically themed anyway. Though they really knocked it out of the park with their Halloween box, so I hope there will be some more snacks relating to the time of year, even if the box itself isn’t themed. I was mildly disappointed there was only one festive/Christmas item in this box (the Umaibo in the Christmas package) as I would have like to know a little more about Christmas in Japan. However it’s really not a huge deal!
The kinosei snacks represent a definite broadening of their snack horizons; ditto the anime snacks. The share packs are a cute idea, great for portion control and also very portable!
Eight of the 17 items are savory (I’m counting the four-pack of rice crackers as four) which is a reasonable balance. I really like that the two bigger bags of snacks are savory. The only drawback is that I’m far more likely to eat them all at once, but what the hell, I love crisps. I’m also glad there’s only one item, and a little dagashi at that, that I can’t eat. Shellfish does pop up in Japanese snacks on a pretty regular basis, so it’s pretty unusual to have a box where I can eat every single thing. But I don’t mind giving up a dagashi!
Overall, I think their revamp is great. I think there is so much opportunity to explore the fun flavours of Japan here, not to mention the wonderful packaging. I’m looking forward to see how they continue with this new format, and having the opportunity to experience even more wild and crazy tastes!
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Click here to read more TokyoTreat reviews!
Premium: $35 per month containing 17 items: 5 popular Japanese snacks, 1 party pack, 4 share packs, 3 dagashi, 1 anime snack, 1 DIY candy kit, 1 kinosei snack, 1 Japanese drink
Classic $25 per month containing 12 items: 4 popular Japanese snacks, 4 share packs, 2 dagashi, 1 DIY candy kit, 1 kinosei snack
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A different version of this review was first published on allsubscriptionboxes.co.uk.
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