A few months ago I suddenly got the idea in my head that I
really wanted to try a snack box subscription. Makeup subscription boxes are kinda meh for me--how many different ones are available now anyway? I'm very picky and struggle with the size of my stash as it is, so those kinds of subscriptions never held any allure for me. But food? Oh yes.
After some researching, I settled on the box from
Okashi Connection ($22 USD). My reasons for going with the Okashi Box: free shipping because I hate paying for shipping; roughly a pound of snacks in every box; and a promised focus on snacks that are seasonal or hard to find outside Japan (being in Vancouver, we have access to a lot of Asian goodies, so I don't want just any green tea Pocky I can pick up at T&T.) FYI this post is totally not sponsored, nor was the box provided for consideration; I thought this would be a fun (pic-heavy!) break from beauty :>
The boxes are shipped out of Japan, so it took about 3 weeks for it to arrive. I roped
MizzJ into splitting the box with me, so it took even longer for us to try everything since we needed a free day to get together. This is everything that came in the May box! They seem to usually put together a mix of savoury and sweet snacks. Not pictured, but the box came with a piece of paper that gives information about each snack so you're not going in totally blind, given that the packaging is all in Japanese.
Pear Shokorantan: kind of like toffee squares, with nuts, chocolate, and pear. Liked them and the pear taste was surprisingly distinct!
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Wafer bars - strawberry and green tea flavours: like a Kit Kat knockoff but not as good. I was really excited to try these, but neither of us liked them very much. The sweetness was strangely cloying.
Peanuts Pocky: okay I have to admit I wasn't very excited to see this at first. I thought, "of
allll the cool Pocky flavours they have in Japan, I get peanut flavour?" Sure the packaging tie-in with Snoopy and Woodstock was cute, but I'm not a big fan of peanut butter. I was caught off-guard by how much I liked them! The coating was like super super smooth peanut butter. Yum. I destroyed the entire box pretty quickly. (Side note: lololol @ nutcream. Yes, I'm an adult.)
Lemon Sour Paper: basically a Japanese version of those sour belts or strips we have here. I
love sour candy, so I quickly staked my claim on it and ate the whole thing. Simple things make me happy.
Veggie Taberu Chips: the different colours implied different flavours, but they all had the same, vaguely vegetable-y taste. We agreed it was kind of like what eating styrofoam must be like, in terms of the texture and taste.
Bin Ramune: okay some detective work happened with this one. Based on the picture of the bunny drinking out of a soda bottle (from the bottom??) and the enclosed straw, we figured out this was something you sip on. But holding the very light, wafer bottle in my hand, I knew there wasn't liquid inside, so it had to be full of powdered sugar. I stuck the straw in (right-side up, thank you very much) and cautiously sipped at it until yep, Pixie Stick-like sugar came up. MizzJ declined to try it. We tossed it at the end of our tasting session. Kind of seems like a choking hazard if you were to suck up too much powder too hard/quickly.
Oyatsu Kids' Pack: a packet full of other smaller snack packs, ostensibly for kids. Top left was puffs that were supposed to be
okonomiyaki flavour. Not bad and basically tasted like okonomiyaki sauce. Next to that is Aji Curry snacks, which were shrimp chip twist-like in shape with a vague Japanese-style curry flavour. Below that was those crumbly cookie balls Asian kids always used to get (we both remembered seeing and eating them as kids.) Next was a hard Cola-flavoured candy ball. I was hoping it had a sour coating or core like the
Super Cola candies I used to destroy my mouth with as a teenager, but it was sweet all the way through :< Last were some grape flavour candies that were basically just like powdered sugar compressed into tablets. Nothing in the pack was particularly delicious.
Elise Double Cast (Blueberry and Yogurt flavour): cream-filled wafer sticks with blueberry on one end and yogurt on the other, with a promotional tie-in to Cinderella! They were okay but closer inspection of the packaging revealed this:
The face of Cinderella's evil stepmother, just screaming at you. She's both on the box and on the plastic sleeve encasing the sticks. It's hard to notice but once we did it was a complete WTF moment. Is she shrieking? Maybe in shock/wonder over how they were able to get two different flavours into one wafer stick?
Chocolate Sea Animal Crackers: okay I saved the best for last. First of all, the packaging is frigging adorable, adorned with penguins, octopus, seals, dolphins, everything. On the back side was a legend of all the different sea animals that you would presumably find in the box.
So frigging adorable! The underside of the lid has a colouring area, and the inside of the box has a hermit crab telling a joke or something. (I think it's a pun about tai/sea bream, but I don't get it.) I was in awe: how could they get so many different animal shapes (40+!) into one box? Here's the answer:
Cue several long minutes of laughter. "What the hell is this?" we cackled, as we tried to match it up to the shapes below. "Is it.. is it a 'sea lawyer'?" MizzJ asks. "What the hell is a sea lawyer?" Googling revealed several non-animal answers, mainly about uncooperative sailors?? I ended up Googling the hiragana "ふか", which is some kind of fish that definitely is not a blob with three holes.
Anyway the chocolate biscuits were pretty good and provided much entertainment and amusement. All the biscuits looked like that, by the way.
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| MizzJ's dog, Ecko, contemplating what kind of sea animal it is. Or biding his time to steal snacks. |
We had a fun afternoon munching on snacks and musing on the possible differences between the Japanese palate and the Western palate. For example, we felt like the savoury snacks were not flavourful or salty enough, and wondered if we were just conditioned by the super-salty flavour profile of chips and other snacks we regularly eat here in Canada.
Based on this box alone, I wouldn't have continued my subscription with Okashi Connection.
However, I forgot to cancel and ended up receiving the June box as well lol. I haven't gone through the whole thing yet but I do like the snacks in that one more so far.
Would you try a snack subscription box? What subscription boxes have tried before?
