During my earlier years in the U.S., one of my friends kindly purchased me a three-month subscription to "Try the World." I am interested in cooking and even started a blog which I infrequently update about new recipes that I've tried so this was a great fit for my interests. I ended up buying my own subscription for a further year, but abandoned it when the service seemed to degrade somewhat and the selection became a bit repetitive on the theme boxes.
However, I did love the boxes and their presentation. They came in cleanly designed boxes with a card describing all of the contents and were full of beautifully packaged items. The experience was one of culture rather than simply a box full of food and it was the manner in which they were curated rather than gathered that made a difference. I mention this because Bokksu is either made by the same people or follows the same concept to a "t".
When rating Bokksu's service, I believe it's important to rate it as much as an experience as it is to look at the contents. When you get the simple cardboard outer box and open it to find a bright orange custom-made box with a wide white ribbon around it to make pulling it out of the outer box easy and elegant, you get a taste of Japan before you sample any of the food contained inside. It is a lush and gorgeous experience and feels like a classy gift. It is exactly the sort of thing you would experience in Japan in terms of the packaging and the presentation.
As is the case with "Try the World", you get a card telling you what all of the items are. Depending on your background, this can be considered a real aid in understanding what is in the box (if you can't read any Japanese and have limited experience) or it can just be a memento that you hold onto for the future to remind you of what you got in past boxes once the food is long gone. The card is professionally laid out and printed on firm card stock. Everything about Bokksu is a class act including the choice of items.
I will admit that I was going to wait to try another service until I'd completed the Oyatsu service's boxes including reviewing the food I got in them. However, I subscribed to Bokksu's mailings and they mentioned that they were doing a "summer citrus" box with a focus on yuzu. Yuzu is Asian citron, a lemon/grapefruit/orange hybrid sort of thing which is fragrant and less sour than it's Western equivalents. Since I adore yuzu-flavored anything, I couldn't resist getting a box while the yuzu getting was good.
Part of the Bokksu experience is that they curate the choices around a tea pairing. My box came with 3 packets of tea, 2 donuts, 3 "pies" (more on those when they are reviewed), 3 sembei, 2 daifuku, 3 rusks, a box of Pocky and a container of Calbee's salted snack straws. I will be reviewing all of these foods in future posts, but I'll say that the assortment was a solid one except for the Rusks which don't fit the theme at all as they are Earl-Grey-tea-flavored. They were a strange choice, but the rest were great.
For a one month purchase of a Bokksu Premium, this cost $39 and includes three-day shipping from the source. Mailings are made at regular intervals so you don't get it within three days of ordering, but within three days of when boxes are sent out. This means that, if they send chocolates which can melt, you'll get things quickly. This is different from some other subscription services which use much cheaper services like seamail or SAL to save money.
I will note that you can get a pretty decent discount on Bokksu if you buy a year's worth at once. They are only $33 per box if you pay for the whole year and I was sorely tempted as I really loved how this looks and I especially love the type of contents I got. The things I got in Bokksu were commonly distributed in my office as part of summer and winter gifts. Several are items often sold only as parts of gift boxes in department stores and you can't find them in average markets, convenience stores, or snack shops. As food boxes go, Bokksu is sending items that few other Japanese snack and food box services will give you. That is no small thing.
However, Bokksu is providing premium content at a premium price. If I'm to be utterly generous in my assessment of the cost of the included items if I were to buy them in Tokyo, it'd be topping out at $15. I'm likely estimating that pretty high so that means less than half of your cost for a $39 box is being spent on the included food. A whopping $24 would be going toward the labor and costs. As I said, this is a beautiful box with likely pricey packaging and the lovely card which I'm sure is not cheap to print, but even if you allow for $1-$2 for the box and a similar generous allowance for the card plus ribbon, that's about $20 for labor in assembling the box, crafting the card, and arranging the contents (by shopping or other means). It wouldn't take many subscribers for that to be a very cushy per hour rate.
Part of the problem with a premium box is that the bar is raised on content not only in terms of quality, but quantity. Like "Try the World", the amount of food you get in Bokksu is limited by their custom box size. You know you're never going to get more than they can cram in there and, though it's expertly packed to fit in as much as possible, I think I should get a bit more for the cost. If I could get a yearly subscription for an average of $25/box, I'd do it without hesitation. I'm very much on the fence for $33 and I'm absolutely not going to continue for a monthly fee of $39.
I should note that Bokksu also offers a "tasting" box for $19 as a single box purchase (that drops to $16 if you pay for a whole year at once) and I'm going to review that option in the future. It is more oriented toward small snacks and similar to the Oyatsu Dagashi box that I reviewed previously.
The web site for Bokksu is very well done and allows you a high degree of flexibility with your ordering. You can, for example, buy a one-box subscription and choose to skip as many months as you want. You can cancel or restart a subscription and you can change from monthly to other types of subscriptions with ease. I am always impressed when a service will let you cancel with ease from their web site rather than make it byzantine and difficult. To me, this is a sign of integrity. Bokksu goes one further by asking you why you are leaving so you can tell them what is wrong or right witht he service. This also gains them points in my book.
My conclusions about Bokksu are:
Service: Amazing
Value: (borderline) Inadequate (depends on subscription plan)
Experience: Amazing
Worth it? It's not worth it as a single box purchase. It's borderline worth it for an annual subscription rate depending on what sort of snacks you'd like to get and how much you value the elegance and curated experience. I expect that, once I have sampled a broader array of Japanese food boxes, I'll come back to Bokksu and take a good, hard look at the annual fees and contents and contemplate making them my main supplier of food for reviews. If their price per box dropped below $30, that'd be a lock for being "worth it" for me personally.
Note: I am not promoting Bokksu. They did not provide me with any free samples. I paid as anyone else would for my subscription. They don't know I'm a Japanese food blogger or that I would be posting about them.
