TokyoTreat – December 2016 Review

TokyoTreat is a monthly subscription that delivers full-size candy and snacks from Japan!  They include many seasonal and limited edition treats, and offer three sizes: small (5-7 snacks), regular (10-12 snacks), and premium (13-17 snacks).  The regular and premium sizes will receive a DIY kit each month, and the premium size also include a drink and a special item!

TokyoTreat: $14.99 for small, $24.99 for regular, and $34.99 for premium.

Free shipping internationally!

TokyoTreat offers 3, 6, and 12 month plans for each size, with slight monthly discounts.

This review is for December’s Premium box.

This month’s theme is Christmas!  Christmas in Japan is celebrated not so much as a religious holiday, but as a romantic/couples’ holiday.  That means CHOCOLATE!  Couples in Japan will often go out to eat together on Christmas Eve and then go view holiday lights at various attractions around the city.

TokyoTreat included this cute little information zine to describe all of the snacks in the box.  It shows what products are offered across all three levels (a higher level will include everything in the lower levels as well), and gives lots of fun facts about Christmas.  The zine also selects some products to give more in depth information, provides English instructions for the DIY kit, and includes a little traditional fairytale.  Plus, how cute is their artwork!?

Christmas Edition Shimi Choco Corn

These are little corn puff stars soaked in chocolate.  At first I thought chocolate and corn would be a bad combination, but holy cow was I wrong.  The stars start out a little bit like giant pieces of cereal, but the chocolate gives it a smoother, less-dry texture.  The flavor is rich chocolate with a light crunch, and by the time you finish it the stars seem as if they had been pure smooth chocolate the whole time.  It really is an interesting snack, and I’m so glad this one bag contained so many stars!

Christmas Edition White Milk Caramel Corn

These are little crescent-shaped corn puffs.  They have a light airy texture, with a sweet condensed milk taste, almost reminiscent of kettle corn but sweeter.  Again, there were a lot of snacks in this little bag, and the reindeer on the front is pretty darn cute.  I’m addicted to these puffs, and I wish I had another bag!

Bireley’s Soft Candy

This company was originally famous for its orange juice, and has since expanded into other flavors.  Their little candy-coated gummy balls come in four flavors: orange, peach, apple, and muscat grape.  I liked these!  The outer shell was smooth and chewy while the softer inside had a juicy flavor.  The flavors were mouthwateringly good: I’m not a fan of artificial grape in general, but I would eat a whole bag of these muscat grape candies! 

Cola Ramune Candy 

These cola-flavored ramune candies reminded me of SweeTarts.  They have a sweet taste from the cola, but end with a little bit of a tart kick.  The ramune part comes from the almost-fizzy texture these candies develop as they break apart.  I really liked these, and it took serious willpower not to eat them all in one sitting.

Strawberry Roll Candy

This was like a strawberry-flavored Fruit by the Foot, but with the texture of a Fruit Roll-up!  It rolls out to 50 cm in a long thin strip, but it’s gummier and chewier than American Fruit by the Foot.  The strawberry flavor reminded me of a lip gloss I had when I was little, in a good way!  This was definitely a throwback snack for me.

Christmas Edition Corn Potage Umaibo (on the ends)

I’ll be honest: I’ve never actually had corn potage, which is a Japanese cream-based corn soup.  I do know that it is a very popular flavor in Japan for everything from chips to candy.  These umaibo (a cylinder-shaped snack made of puffed corn) are flavored with corn potage seasoning, and were a delightfully salty inclusion in a box that had a lot of sweet flavors.

Christmas Edition Chocolate Umaibo (in the middle)

These umaibo were covered in chocolate in the spirit of Christmas!  The chocolate was rich and smooth, and covered the taste of the corn puff enough so there was no weird salty/sweet clash.  You could barely taste the corn except for the slightest bit of salt that really just complemented the sweet chocolate.  Again, TokyoTreat surprises me with the combination of corn and chocolate!

Cocoa Flavor Chocobi Ramune 

Shin-chan!  He’s the little mascot on the front of this green bag.  The candies inside are little star-shaped chocolate-flavored ramune candies.  They reminded me a bit of chocolate Necco wafers in their texture and taste, which I can’t really say I’m a fan of, but they have Vitamin D added so they’re definitely healthier!

Christmas Fugashi

Fugashi is a Japanese snack made from baked gluten and coated in brown sugar.  It seems like this has been puffed up (like a corn puff), so it has a light, airy texture inside.  The brown sugar outside caramelized into a slightly-crunchy coating that provided the only sweet flavor.  It’s a very simple traditional snack.

Hi Milk Chocolate CUBIE

These were very straightforward little cubes of chocolate.  The unique feature here is that these chocolates were made for “people on the go”.  Each cube has a special coating that prevents them from melting in your hand as quickly.  The bag is also made of a stiffer material that allows it to maintain its shape when it’s folded over, meaning it can be sealed after opening.  The chocolate itself is sweet and smooth, and the little cube shape is cute!

Komekko Scallop Flavor

These are rice crackers that have a hint of sesame and scallop-flavored soy sauce.  I love scallop-flavored anything, but unfortunately I couldn’t really taste it here aside from a very light seafood-salty flavor.  I mostly tasted the toasted flavor of a rice cracker.  These are great in that they aren’t fried though, so you can eat the whole (well-filled!) bag without guilt. 

Mini Choco Chips

This was very straight forward: they’re mini chocolate chip cookies!  They’re delightfully crumbly, and have a slight hint of cinnamon to them.  The cookies are a little bigger than a quarter, and have a surprising amount of chocolate chips in them.  They’re a delicious take on a traditionally Western snack.

Tomato Pretz 

Pretz!  TokyoTreat says they included Tomato Pretz this month for its Christmas-y color scheme haha.  Pretz are long thin breadstick-like crackers, kind of like Pocky without the chocolate coating.  These pretz are tomato-flavored, and they kind of remind me of pizza-flavored pringles without the cheese taste.  You can definitely taste a roasted tomato flavor, along with lots of savory herbs.

Mokeke with ball chain 

Look at this adorable little plushie!  Mokeke are cute aliens whose arms have a little crystal button on the end so you can secure them around objects.  They just want to give the world hugs!  There were several variations that TokyoTreat subscribers could have received, but I think this sweet pink one is my favorite.

Cream Stew Ramune

Ramune soda… in a cream stew flavor… hmm…

Ramune is a popular “marble soda” that comes in a variety of flavors.  It’s tightly sealed at the top of the bottle with a glass marble, which you pop back into the bottle to open.  This particular one is cream stew flavored.  I’ve had cream stew before, and never in my tasting of it did I think, “hey this would make a great soda flavor.”  I did not have high hopes when I tried it, but surprisingly it was not as bad as I thought it would be.  It certainly has a creamy, savory taste, but the fizz from the bubbles balances out the heaviness of the flavor so it isn’t unpleasant.  It smells like buttered popcorn, and tastes creamy with a little bit of vegetable flavor.  I probably wouldn’t repurchase this, but it’s not horrible – just a savory cream soda!

Puchi Puchi Art Gummy DIY  

So I was really excited for this one, because it’s my first DIY snack!  I really wanted it to be a success, but… well… read on.

This was everything that came in the package: two trays for mixing and setting the final gummy design, four colored gelatin packets, one clear gelatin packet, a design template, and a pipette.

I mixed all of the colored powders together (not quite the colors I intended to come out with, but they weren’t too bad), and was just supposed to use the pipette to add little drops of color to the clear liquid in the tray.  Unfortunately, the colors had already started to set before I could even suck any into the pipette, so it was impossible to drop them into the tray at all.  It sort of became one big goopy mess.

For the last step, you put the clear gelatin powder over the whole thing and let it sit for two minutes.  I don’t have any final pictures to show you, because it was basically an artistic disaster, but here have a picture of my kitty judging my DIY skills.  After I let the gummy sit, I removed it from the tray and tasted it.  It didn’t taste gummy at all – very paste-y and grainy.  So unfortunately, my first foray into the DIY candy world was not a success.  To be honest, I don’t think I needed to add all the contents of each packet, but the instruction booklet didn’t give any amounts, so I just dumped it all in.  Now I’ll know better for the future, at least!

Overall, this was a great box from TokyoTreat.  There were a LOT of snacks in here, so you definitely get your money’s worth, and each individual snack was packed to the brim – no 2/3-full-of-air bags here!  Everything in this box is very modern and trendy, and they’re things you could find at any grocery store in Japan, but not internationally.  It really does feel like a care package put together by a Japanese friend!  I love the Christmas theme and I thought it tied the box together nicely.  I was sad that my DIY kit didn’t turn out as expected, but I will just go console myself with all of the other delicious snacks in the box!

Edit: This post originally stated this box was for the month of November.  It is actually the December box, and the post has been edited to reflect that.

PR Sample.  All opinions are my own, and no compensation was received for this review.  This post contains affiliate links.