Review: Sakuraco Snack Box
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, please read our affiliate disclosure.
Our website contains a contact form where you can get in touch with us if you so choose. We don’t respond to the bulk of messages, because they’re usually scams or people who clearly didn’t read the blog and think we are the capybara cafe (we are not the capybara cafe we cannot help you get a reservation). But every now and then, we get something good.
Ichigo is a company that offers Japan-themed subscription boxes. They have TokyoTreat, which features popular Japanese treats like candy, sodas, and instant noodles, as well as NoMakeNoLife, a Japanese & Korean beauty box, YumeTwins, a kawaii subscription box, and Sakuraco, which focuses on regional favorites and traditional Japanese culture.
The nice people at Ichigo offered to send us a free box to review. We chose Sakuraco both because we’ve probably tried a lot of the TokyoTreat stuff thanks to our konbini addiction, and because we’re trying to eat healthier and we figured Sakuraco might be less terrible for us. The box arrived in two days, and get a load of how many treats were inside!
The Box
This tiny box was packed with roughly 8 million little snacks, most of which we’d never seen before. Each box is themed around a region, with past boxes including “New Year’s in Hiroshima” and “Kyoto’s Crimson Leaves.” This months’ theme was “Festivals of Tohoku,” something I knew little about.
One thing I really appreciated was that there wasn’t a bunch of tissue paper, styrofoam, or other nonsense clogging up the box - just a pretty box with nice messages packed to the brim with snacks. In addition to the traditional “oyatsu” (snacks), there were a few other nice elements.
Light fare: towel, tea, postcards, and guide
The box contained one non-food item, a neko tenugui (traditional Japanese towel). It was pretty, and if you don’t live in Japan, I can see how this would be a fun thing to get in your box. But we live in Japan, so we’ve gotten these things before and don’t have much use for another. It’s pretty, though!
There were also two bags of Iyemon Matcha Genmaicha tea. It was much lighter than I expected - when I think matcha, I think a thick, dirty green, but this was almost clear - and had a light taste. Sometimes matcha and green tea can be a bit strong for me, so I liked how this wasn’t overpowering. I wouldn’t say the taste jumped out at me, but I’ve rarely been overwhelmed by tea in my life.
The box contained a welcome postcard with an explanation of the Tohoku theme along with a booklet with full descriptions of every snack along with allergy information. It also had some great information about Tohoku’s Sendai Matsuri (three great festivals) and some of the producers of the snacks in the box. The booklet is really well put together, and if you’re a foreigner who wants to learn more about Japan, this is something you won’t get with any other subscription service.
But you don’t care about any of that. You want to know how good the treats were. Here we go.
The okay snacks
The answer is no, we didn’t eat all these treats in one sitting. We were responsible and took four whole days to scarf them all down. Some were better than others, and some were doubles or triples so we could each have our own, while others we had to share. Here are the ones we thought were just okay:
Custard Cream Pan - a standard at Japanese convenience stores, this is a fluffy white bun filled with cream. The cream in this one was really delicious, but unfortunately, there was not quite enough of it. The bread was big and poofy, so it needed a bit more cream to balance out the bread. Inside was amazing, outside was a bit too bready.
Iburi Gakko Arare - we were split on this bag of crunchy little bits. Eriko thought it tasted like pickled radish (as it was supposed to) and didn't like it; I thought it tasted like crunchy rice puffs and nonspecific flavor dust, and did like it. Who knows who's right? (I know. I am right. I am king. You are butt.)
Sweet Potato Amanatto - tiny sugar-covered gummies. The difference here is you actually get some sweet potato skin along with the gummy. It's good, a little sugary and a little small, but tasty. Didn’t blow our socks off.
Mini Shrimp Tempura - crunchy little shrimp-flavored tempura bits. This is a common Japanese snack, something that might confuse Americans who aren’t used to big chunks of shrimp tail in their chips. If you don’t live in Japan, I could see this one being a wild introduction to Japanese flavors, but if you live here, you’ve probably got a konbini around the corner that sells something just like it.
The good snacks
These were the treats that stood out either because of taste or because they were things we wouldn’t be likely to find at our local market.
Kurumi (walnut) Mochi - Americans might only know mochi as an ice cream topping, but Japan has all sorts of mochi, both savory and sweet. This was a small bar of mochi wrapped in edible paper. Not terribly sweet, definite walnut taste, with small chunks of walnuts in it. If you like the taste of walnuts, you will like this.
Ginger Senbei - a little sweeter and thinner than my beloved shibafune, this thin cookie had a good balance of sweet and spicy. I really like ginger snaps (but oddly enough, not ginger with sushi), so I could have used a bit more kick. But I could definitely see myself sitting in front of the TV and eating an entire box of these.
Apple Cream Cookie - thin cookie (think fortune cookie), and sandwiched in between two layers was a sweet white cream (hee hee) with just a hint of apple. This was a really fancy treat, the kind you would get at a nice Japanese department store. The type you'd give as a gift around Xmas time. Not something you'd see every day, and quite delicious.
Konjac Peach Jelly - think of this as a sack full of six individually-wrapped peach-flavored Jell-O shots. Tasted like normal jelly with a normal peach taste. We liked them, but they lacked the cool factor of the other snacks on the good list.
The ameeeeeeeezing snacks
All the snacks in the box were pretty tasty, but they weren’t all things that I’d need a curated service to procure for me or that I’d go out of my way to buy. These last few, on the other hand, were SO DELICIOUS and surprising and cool that they took the Sakuraco box to the next level.
Peanut Cookie Senbei - YUM YUM YUM, a crisp peanut cookie with tons of peanut chunks in it. This one was great. I'd absolutely buy this if I saw it in the store. In fact, a few days later, Eriko saw something that looked similar at our store and bought it; it wasn’t as good as the one from the box.
Roasted Corn Arare - oh, yeah. That's it, son. Like a long, flat, pillowy corn nut. Crunchy, tasty, refreshing. Only complaint is there were only two in the box.
La France Gummy - not too sweet, nice pear taste - compared to gummies you can get at the konbini, this was a cut above.
Michinoku Miruru - oh my. That is the one. That is the one for sure. Soft, creamy, sweet, amazing, buttery pastry. I would walk to Fukushima (where it’s made) just to eat another one of these things.
Conclusion: is Sakuraco worth it?
We’ve tried other subscription boxes before, and even ordered some for friends and family in America, but Sakuraco is different. Those other boxes are for people who want to marvel at crazy Japanese products or enjoy Kit Kat flavors they can’t get at home. Sakuraco gives you the chance to learn about a region of Japan you probably aren’t familiar with while tasting high-end treats from local producers that you’d never get the chance to try otherwise.
Subscriptions to Sakuraco range from $32.50-$37.50 a month depending on how long you subscribe. That’s about the same as other boxes, but what you’re getting here is a lot more impressive. Instead of just piling together a random assortment of treats, there’s a real theme and research and effort being put into it. We were definitely impressed by Sakuraco.
If you live in Japan, this is probably the only Japanese snack box I’d recommend. And if you live abroad, Sakuraco allows you to learn about Japan in a way that you won’t through another box service. Your friends may have tried Crunky or Black Thunder before, but they haven’t had Michinoku Miruru, which is a shame because it is amazing. Sakuraco gets our easy-to-obtain stamp of approval.
And if you’ve decided to give Sakuraco a try, why not sign up using our affiliate link? You can try a trial box or subscription of 3, 6, or 12 months - the longer you subscribe, the cheaper it is! Here’s the link:
