KitKat "Merry Christmas Happy Box" (product announcement)

All images come from Nestle Japan.

Some of my readers may recall that it is common around the end of the year for merchants to sell "lucky" or "happy" bags or boxes. They are usually associated with the New Year and are sold on or after the first. This one, by Nestle Japan, has "Merry Christmas" above it so I'm not sure if they're targeting Christmas or the New Year. My guess is that it's both, but it is mostly for Christmas.

The assortment that you can buy via mail order includes 1102 grams of candy for 2500 yen (about $24). Shipping is "free", but my feeling is that the price of what you're getting essentially more than encompasses the cost of postage. The thing is that the collection isn't really anything special. It includes the commonly available "adult sweetness" KitKats (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, green tea), Nestle Crunch bars, Milo, and Aero plain chocolates. It's a little like receiving a bag or box of Hershey's candy that anyone can buy in a regular supermarket. 

This is not necessarily a bad package, but it's nothing special in terms of contents. Certainly, a recipient would be "happy" to get it, but there's nothing "lucky" about it - unless they put some sort of golden KitKat in every millionth box.

Random Picture #96

Clover, a patisserie/cake shop offers dragon-themed fukubukuro. This is the year of the dragon, in case the obvious wasn't hitting you on the head hard enough. That is not my hand or coat, incidentally. 

This picture is slightly late in coming along, but I figure that as long as it is January, I can sneak in some New Year's shots. My husband and I went to Tokyu department store in Shibuya, an extremely popular shopping district in Tokyo, to check out the holiday sales. While New Year's holiday sales aren't quite as crazy as Black Friday in the U.S., they are pretty busy and can be intense. There are sometimes feeding frenzies on bags of choice products. This year, for reasons unknown, we saw a gaggle of men swarming fukubukuro ("lucky bag"/grab bag) that contained underpants. 

Our main purpose was to scope out fukubukuro, which often offer goods exceeding the value of the price of the bag. We saw tons of clothing grab bags and then hit the basement for the food ones. About 95% of them showed you the contents of the bag and most represented adequate value provided that you wanted every single item in the bag, but we didn't find anything appealing this year. I did like how attractive many of the packaging designs were, and was particularly fond of the way dragons were worked into so many things (like this cake).

Random Picture #94

Peacock "lucky bags". They're stapled shut, but the notion of there being a surprise was rather undermined by the neighboring display. 

Last year, my husband and I went a little crazy and bought three "lucky bags" (fukubukuro). For the two or three people who haven't heard me prattle about these before, they are grab bags that are sold around the new year which include a variety of items that (supposedly) have a value that exceeds the total cost of the bag. It took us over 6 months to get through most of the stuff we bought, and that was with me giving away some of it to one of my students. This year, we decided to exercise great caution in such purchases so that we wouldn't be faced with months and months of food to eat up (or throw out). 

Fortunately for us, one of our previous suppliers of fukubukuro, Peacock supermarket, obliged us by revealing the contents of their lucky bags before purchase. This year was rather a contrast to last year in which there were some actual food items in the bag like coffee, tea, soy sauce, seaweed and egg drop soup because it mainly contains snacks. I wasn't able to dig through the entire bag, but it was heavy on the salted snacks and sweets including cookies, (European imported!) sugar wafers, castella cake, at least two kinds of sembei, salted shrimp snacks, (imported) potato sticks, and karinto (crispy, lightly sweet, fried brown sugar snacks that are very popular in Japan). The cost of the bag, 2000 yen/$26, is not incredibly high, but I'm not sure that the contents represent a great deal of value for the money, particularly if every single items is not of interest. Still, I think it is a nice assortment, but we passed on it. 

Variety Friday: A Tale of 3 Fukubukuro

Those who have been reading this blog for awhile may recall that "fukubukuro" are bags full of surprise items (in most cases) that are sold in Japan around the New Year. The total value of the items in the bag are supposed to be exceed what you paid for them. The translation of "fukubukuro" is "lucky bag" or "happy bag". In past years, I've purchased these from Mr. Donut and Starbucks.

This year, we weren't sure where we were going to get our fukubukuro, but we decided to investigate some places further afield on January 1 in order to find something new. Unfortunately, we found that it was a dry run through Shinjuku for the most part. Electronics shops (Bic Camera and Yodobashi) were open and loudly selling fukubukuro, but they didn't offer much of appeal. Most of theirs were accessories for digital cameras, video cameras, iPods, and iPads. The contents were surprises but fit a theme.

It turned out that January 3rd was the best day for finding fukubukuro as shops had opened that had been closed, and our local options were pretty good. In fact, they were so good that we ended up with three of them. The first was from Baskin Robbins ice cream. The two young women pictured above were trekking up and down the local shopping street carrying a basket full of them. Each was 1000 yen ($12.20) and quite small. The girls were almost peculiarly delighted when we bought one. I wonder if they were sent out into the cold and told to sell the whole basket or die trying.

We didn't expect actual ice cream, but we did expect coupons to purchase ice cream.As you can see from the picture above (click any picture to see a bigger version), we got a couple of 500-yen coupons so we get back the entire value of the "lucky bag" in ice cream. We also got a snoopy mug, a couple of ice cream magnets, and an ice cream cone cell phone strap. The other items are a list of shops and brochures for Baskin Robbins products. All in all, this is a decent investment in a Fukubukuro provided that you were going to buy some ice cream anyway. The little bag is cloth and can be reused as a tote.

The second bag that we bought was from a supermarket called Peacock. It's part of a chain of shops, but it's not especially common. This one cost 2000 yen ($24.40). If you bought all of these items separately in the shop, undoubtedly they would cost more than 2000 yen.

The items it contained (from left) are: reduced salt soy sauce, roasted seaweed, shrimp snacks, squid- and sweet-sake-flavored rice crackers, Chinese soup mix, green tea, hot pepper and garlic paste (for cooking), tea bags, drip coffee with paper filter system, ground coffee, animal crackers, seaweed rice crackers, and chocolate cookies.

Mainly, the shrimp and squid snacks, and roasted seaweed are not very good for either of us since we're not fans of seafood flavors. The coffee, tea, and cookies are all of use, and I expect we can use the garlic/hot pepper paste, soy sauce, and Chinese soup mixes (though we've never tried them before). I'm going to be giving away the extra items to someone who I know likes them.

The final bag from the snack shop was probably the smallest gamble as it was from Okashi no Machioka snack shop. Even stuff which I might not normally buy would be blogging fodder from this bag. However, a lot of this is stuff I wouldn't buy of my own volition. I guess that either makes it good or bad as it'll push me to try new snacks, or make me sample food I wouldn't really want to eat. All I know is that it's going to take a very, very long time to eat all of this. I'm actually grateful that many of these are very small packages of a half ounce (14 grams, or less). This one also cost 1000 yen ($12.20) and also probably represented the smallest overall value. Certainly all of these items would cost more than 1000 yen if purchased separately, but not that much more. A lot of the items in the front are kid's snacks which would cost between 20-40 yen each.

The contents are (from left):
back "row": Mayonnaise and cheese Pringles, Toppo pretzels filled with chestnut cream, maple pie cookies, Shrimp rice crackers, Toy Story 3 chocolate-covered crunchy snacks
2nd "row": Heart chocolate-covered peanuts, "cheese fondue" Cratz pretzels with almonds, Milky petit (salty milk?) candies
3rd "row": vacuum-packed chestnuts, "fried potato" snack (more like a weird chip), fluffy brown sugar "stick" called "fu-bo-san taro", Chip Chop crispy chocolate snacks with chocolate filling
front "row": cabbage Taro salted snacks, "Big Katsu" fried snack, "new mochi" Taro snack, and "corn Taro".

I've already reviewed some of these things, but most are new to me.

I reviewed the Big Katsu here:
http://japanesesnackreviews.blogspot.com/2010/09/suguru-big-katsu.html

I reviewed the corn taro (as part of a big pack) here:
http://japanesesnackreviews.blogspot.com/2009/12/variety-friday-japanese-christmas-packs.html

And I talked about the cabbage taro and fu-bo san taro here (as part of another big pack):
http://myso-calledjapaneselife.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-pack-2.html

In terms of "value", the supermarket bag easily represents the best value overall, but it is still a gamble. For snackers, I'd definitely say grab the Okashi no Machioka bag next year if you can. There's enough in it to make the value worthwhile and unless you've very picky, you'll get your money's worth out of the bag.

Variety Friday: Starbucks Japan Fukubukuro

My husband buying the "lucky bag" and asking the shop attendant about the availability of such things.

Every year on New Year's Day, you can find a variety of shops in Japan selling "lucky bags" or something equivalent to what we call a grab bag in the United States. Readers who have been with me for a long time or who have read some of the archives may recall that last year I talked about a "fukubako", or "lucky box" which I bought at Mister Donut.

The main idea behind these things is that they are meant to be a bargain. The value of the items in total is supposed to exceed the amount you pay. I've always thought that these things were simply a way of unloading stuff that nobody wanted to buy and that couldn't be unloaded. After all, when that case of purple polka-dot tights isn't moving, you can stuff one in every "lucky bag" and claim that they're a 1000 yen (about $11) value. If your shop carries enough bum goods, you could easily stuff your bags with all of the craptacular inventory that won't move off your shelves and present the collection of embarrassing and distasteful items as "value".

The Mister Donut fukubukuro and fukubako are undeniably one of the best values for your money since you pay 2000 yen ($21.50) and get coupons which allow you to buy 20 donuts. The value of the donuts alone is at least 2000 yen, often more since many donuts are more than 100 yen. You also get a plethora of goodies ranging from kid's toys to dishware. Unfortunately, you also have to stuff yourself with donuts between January 1 and March 31 because the donut coupons run out at the end of March. For this reason, my husband and I decided to give a different shop our "lucky bag" money this year. Since we can never have too much coffee, we decided to try on Starbucks this time around.

Our local Starbucks is in a JR station and only had two of the cloth totes that constitute their "lucky bags" on display. They carry two varieties, one for 5000 yen ($54) and another for 3000 yen ($32) and the more expensive one was sold out. My husband asked how many of each they had on hand and the salesgirl told him they had 20 of the pricier ones and 30 of the cheaper ones. She also said that that was all they had period so we got the next to the last one for the season. Note that we arrived at 12:30 or so on January 1st so they did not last long.


As for the contents of the bag, they gave us three 70-gram (2.5 oz.) bags of ground coffee (Verona, House Blend, and Sumatra), two coupons in gift cards good for any drink of any size, a double-decker bento box, a very small and thin lap rug in a Starbucks cup cloth holder, and a small fair trade African woven cloth tote bag. The value would break down something like this:

• 3 small bags of coffee: ~1000 yen
• 2 drink coupons: a maximum of 1000 yen (biggest, most expensive drinks being purchased)
• double-decker bento box: ~100 yen without the Starbucks motif, to be charitable, let's say 300 yen
• African fair trade cloth tote bag : a maximum of 1000 yen
  
• Starbucks cloth tote bag: a maximum of 1000 yen
• lap blanket and mug: ~300 yen
  

Technically, the value of the goods exceeded the cost, but realistically, two tote bags, neither of which is large enough to really shop with are not of much use and both are overpriced as retail items. Their true value is closer to 500 yen each. I also think it's absurd to put another tote bag in the main tote as a means of adding value.

The Starbucks 3000-yen "lucky bag" was a big disappointment to us. We would have preferred more coffee, more coupons, or at least some reusable Starbucks cups to the silly lap rug, and second tote, or even the bento box. At least the bento box is arguably useful though. It's actually a pretty nice size and has chopsticks snapped into the top of the bottom box. The main thing is that my husband doesn't eat traditional Japanese bento lunches and I work from home so it's not of great utility to us personally.

I wouldn't recommend the lucky bags at Starbucks if you're looking to take part in the spirit of the season during New Year's and pick up a lucky bag. Next year, I'm thinking we'll pick up something at a different place. If you can eat a lot of donuts, the Mister Donut box is still the best bet.

Quick update: I found someone who posted about the 2010 Mister Donut fukubako if you'd like to see them (there appear to be two different ones), they're here and here. It's rather similar to last year's haul.