Snacks in the box: Japanese candy and snack ‘tsumeawase’ haul boxes
Every time we wander into the snacks aisle at a Japanese conbini, it’s like going to Narnia. There’s always so much choice – almost too much. It’s scarily easy to spend 15-20 minutes deciding on a chocolate bar.
So, this time, we decided to save ourselves some time. No hesitating in front of the shelf for us. Nope, we ordered a pre-selected Japanese snack box online instead. You can find those on DEJAPAN, by the way.
Our box arrived safe and sound, looking very mysterious.
Some assortments are more premium, and some are seriously cheap. This snack box cost us only 3,000 yen, which is a reasonable price. (That’s about $27, or £20, at the time of writing. Not bad, huh?) And it was packed tight with stuff. No empty spaces whatsoever. You get as much food as possible for your cash.
See? Crammed with delicious Japanese snacks. The coloured post-its on some of the packets say ‘omake’ in katakana. That means those bits were thrown in for free. Even more of a bargain.
Everything else inside was hidden under this tightly-packed layer. We took these out, to try and get a better pic, but there was even more underneath that. The only way to show you everything was to unload the whole box. Take a look at how that went…
What’s in the box?
Down one side, spanning almost the whole length of the box, was a giant crunchy choco bar. It’s seriously called Super Big Choco. You can just about see it in the photo above, on the right-hand side. From the top right corner, to over 3/4 of the way down that side. That’s how long this bar is. Needless to say, we’re looking forward to eating it. Might be a team effort.
The super big size of that choco was rivalled by the big packet of melonpan-flavoured cookies. Did you know that melonpan doesn’t contain any real melon? Yeah, and these cookies definitely don’t. It’s not part of your ‘5 a day’. But if we could eat 5 of these every day, we’d be happy.
And the sugar continued with a bunch of jellies and gummies, a strawberry Giant Caplico, crunchy caramel twists, Crayon Shin-chan Chocobii, and creme brulee cookies.
Our mixed snack box had us covered whether we wanted sweet or savoury. As well as a large bag of Hokkaido butter potato chips, we got purple potato chips AND limited Halloween-only ‘cheese gratin’ prawn senbei. They’d been packed well, and arrived nicely intact rather than crushed into crumbs.
If that wasn’t enough, our Japanese snack box was completed with Umaibo corn snacks. At least 15 flavours of Umaibo exist, probably more. We got: cheese, corn potage, and the sugar rusk flavour. No chicken curry or mentaiko Umaibo this time, but we guess that’s the luck of the random snack draw. (Some multipacks guarantee you certain flavours, give those a try.)
Other smaller things were hiding near the bottom of the box. A pack of minty gum, a box of Kumamon chocolate Pocky, a choco pie bar…
In total, we had 26 snacks to devour. And you bet we did.
This selection’s awesome, but we could easily have gone way bigger. Some Japanese snack boxes have 100+ items inside. They might include smaller bits, like chews and yet more Umaibo, or larger items like bags of Caramel Corn. The randomness is all part of the fun.
Order snack and candy boxes from Japan
The name for random snack boxes like this is ‘tsumeawase’ in Japanese. Check out some of the different types:
