Yaokin Vegetable Salad Umaibo

Some time ago, I bought a variety pack of Yaokin salted snacks which included 5 varieties of "umaibo". "Umai" is "delicious" and "bo" means stick. I figured that this would cover pretty much all of the umaibo I'd ever want or need to sample. These are very cheap kid's snacks, and tend to be a bit greasy, nicely crispy, and fairly flavorful. Their main appeal is in the texture, which is a large airy corn puff, and their relatively strong natural corn flavor. Though they come in different flavors, but are generally a similar experience with a backbone of savory flavors like garlic, onion, chicken, beef and pork with another flavor layer added into the mix as the dominant one. Their main appeal, frankly, is that they are incredibly cheap and come with sometimes amusing package designs.

The reason I find myself reviewing another umaibo is not that the package is claiming that they have added more deliciousness (umai uppu!), but rather that my husband was handed a magazine in a plastic bag that also included this umaibo. Free snacks! All you have to do is be on the right street corner when someone is handing out a magazine which is almost all advertising and almost no actual content. If you want to buy one for yourself, they'll set you back about 10 yen (13 cents) at most supermarkets or snack shops.

Though this claims to be "vegetable" flavor, it smells rather fishy. I'm not sure why that should be because it doesn't taste fishy. In fact, it's hard to pin down what it tastes like at all because there is a general melange of spices. The ingredients list includes cabbage, onion, bell pepper, potato, and garlic seasonings. It tastes pretty good in the way that things that are very, very bad for you can taste. There is so much oil on the exterior that placing it on a tissue to take a picture left an oily spot on it.

Since I didn't buy this, I can't really speak to "buying it again", but if someone gave me another one for free, I'd certainly eat one again. All of these Yaokin snacks are economical salted snack niceness. There's no nutrition data on these, but I imagine they're made with damaged fats and have little of redeeming value. Still, the portion size is smallish and the texture is good and they are flavorful. Next time someone gives you one for free, I recommend taking it.

Calbee Sapporo Potato Pebbly Vegetable

Back when I was working in an office, I used to pick up these Calbee vegetable snacks on occasion when I wanted a salted snack treat. I didn't buy them because I thought they were so tasty, but rather because they seemed "healthier" than potato chips. If I had a sandwich and I wanted something extra with them, this was my "go to" crunchy snack.

I thought that the calorie count was lower because they didn't seem greasy. It turns out that they aren't seriously better for you in any way when measured by weight, but the volume is higher because they're relatively airy inside. This small bag is 117 calories. You get the illusion of fewer calories since you eat more of them, and that's snot exactly "nothing" when you're in it for the crispiness factor.

I found this small bag (24 grams/.85 oz.) at Seiyu supermarket for 38 yen (45 cents), and decided to revisit my old stand-by. Most of the time, I see much bigger 100 yen bags, but I knew I wasn't going to want to have that much of it around. While I couldn't remember these well enough to review them, I also recalled that they weren't so stellar that I found myself buying them over the years. Besides, now they are made with "pebbly" vegetables bits attached to them and I was "sure" that would represent a vast improvement.

The vegetable component of these is vastly exaggerated unless you only count potatoes. Their flavors are added mainly via a variety of powders including onion, green pepper, pumpkin, and tomato. I'm pretty sure that the little colorful lumps that are stuck on the side of the potato sticks are not real vegetables but some sort of colored potato wads.

These don't smell like much of anything, but that's not really a shock. The "straws" are crunchy and salty, and really don't have a very strong taste. They taste mainly liked processed potato with a slight vegetable aftertaste. If the potato flavor were stronger, these would be better. As it is, they're mainly about the texture and salt, and that's just not enough.

These aren't bad at all, but they fail entirely at being particularly good. Even for something that may be a bit lower in calories than a potato chip, they're too unimpressive to consider buying again.

Vegetable Mix KitKat

Naming this a "vegetable" KitKat isn't exactly truth in advertising. It does contain apple, carrot, grape, lemon, celery, green pepper, asparagus, Chinese cabbage, kale, and an increasingly diminishing list of vegetables and herbs. That being said, this really tastes like apple with an undertone of carrot. These are the only two flavors that are truly present. The bar smells like apple, and that is the dominant flavor, but the carrot comes through as a secondary flavor.


This KitKat is a joint venture between juice maker Ito En and Nestle Japan. The bar is likely flavored with the components of one of It En's juice varieties. I can't say that I've sampled them since I am a bit wary of Ito En after my previous experiences which ranged from "meh" to "yuck". I can say that there are quite a few vegetable and fruit juice combination drinks for sale in Japan and most of them favor the fruit end, just as this bar does. That makes the vegetables mere marketing tools rather than serious components. It's tantamount to pureeing one small, well-cooked broccoli floret and dropping it into a huge bowl of brownie batter and saying that the brownies now contain vegetables.


The advertising cheat aside, this bar is actually just fine. It's not stellar, but it is pleasant in the same way as the apple flavor KitKat. The carrot aspect adds a little more depth to the flavor profile and perhaps the overall fruit and vegetable combination mitigates some of the sweetness of this being a white chocolate-based bar.

I'd actually consider buying this again if the mood hit me. Mainly, you'd have to be thinking that something with apple flavor would be appealing, and that the texture of wafers would be good to go with it. There's something about this type of candy bar which makes it feel less heavy than chocolate, despite actually being the same calorie-wise as a regular KitKat.

This is also reviewed at Jen's KitKat blog here.

Veggie Taberu (Eat Veggies) Snacks

Look at all of those happy vegetables. They seem delighted to be pureed, processed, and turned into waffled snack foods. How can one disappoint them and not give them a try, particularly when the implication that this is like eating healthy, healthy vegetables is in the product name.

The front of the bag says that there are 7 kinds of vegetables, though not all of the vegetables are used in every kind of chip. The green ones include broccoli, green pepper, spinach, tomato, mallow leaves, carrot, and pumpkin. The red ones are carrot, tomato, and red pepper. I guess the green ones are a lot healthier for you considering their heavier mix of greens.


The two types of chips were not evenly represented in my bag. There were far more green ones than oranges ones. I don't know if this was intentional or just random chance, but the "orange" vegetables are generally more expensive in Japanese markets than the "green" ones, so it might be an attempt to have more of the cheaper chips, or more of the "healthier" ones. Unsurprisingly, the bag smells like a mishmash of vegetable odors. It's not particularly appealing, but not awful. The chips are spongy and light. They're modestly crisp, but not brittle like a chip or cracker. The texture is closer to popcorn than to chips or Cheetos.

The nice thing about real vegetables is that their flavor is not very intense. The bad thing about processed vegetables is that they are somewhat like intense distillates of the real thing. That is, it's like someone took broccoli, cooked it into a mush, and then dehydrated it to remove the moisture and increase the intensity. To the extent that these chips fail, that's a big part of it, and I mean the green ones in particular. You can concentrate carrot and tomato and still make for a nice flavor, but you can't do the same with broccoli, peppers, or spinach. It is just too much.

The green ones taste like essence of broccoli with a green pepper aftertaste. There's a strong hint of chlorophyll in them. They're not awful, but they're not as good as eating the real vegetable taste-wise, which is saying a lot for a chip. Chips are supposed to make consuming vegetables more fun. The red ones are actually pretty good. They're ever so slightly spicy at the finish because of the tomato and mainly taste like carrot.

I will probably very slowly finish this bag, but there's every chance it'll languish in my snack basket for quite some time before I reach the bottom. I definitely wouldn't buy it again. I will note that this seems to be part of a summer trend for "salad" flavored items which appears to be revving up.

Edamame Rice Crackers (Kameda Seika brand)

Edamame is a young soybean served in its pod. It's often boiled with salt and then eaten whole, usually with beer. Most of my experience eating edamame in Japan has been at Japanese bars (called izakaya). For a bean, they are pretty darn tasty. My husband isn't a great fan of things in the vegetable oeuvre, but he does like these.

Edamame is currently hot with the foodie crowd in the West right now. It's become quite the fad if you believe food blogs. People who are too erudite for the likes of green beans talk about using edamame. To be fair, these do taste better than green beans or peas. Nonetheless, I will continue to imply that they are snobs, while secretly agreeing with their preference for these fine beans in a pod.


I picked these up in a local supermarket for 200 yen ($2.24). The entire bag is 90 grams (3.2 oz.) and contains 6 small packets. There are about 15 small crackers per packet. If you do the math, you learn that each little bag has 65 calories. Compared to something like potato chips, they are slightly less caloric and have just about the same amount of fat. They may be a little better nutritionally since they are made primarily with soybeans, followed by rice, and vegetable oil. They also contain a small amount of peas, though peas comes later on the ingredient list than salt so it can't be many.


These are brought to us by Kameda Seika, maker of a wide variety of rice cracker snacks. Most recently, I reviewed their cayenne pepper sembei. Since I like edamame, but am so-so on sembei, I wasn't quite sure how I'd react to these, but I was looking forward to trying them. The truth is that I'd been eyeballing these in the store for awhile before I took the plunge. I wasn't apprehensive, mind you, but just had too much other stuff to try.

They smell like edamame which is no great surprise. They also have a hint of the usual rice cracker scent. Each cracker is super crispy and perfectly salted with what appears to be extra fine salt. There's a bit of a chlorophyll flavor in there, like a smidgen of grassiness. Though there is a lot of edamame in them, it's not an overwhelming flavor. It's well-balanced with the blander toasted rice flavor.

These are immensely satisfying as a salty snack treat and more earthy and natural tasting than a potato chip. I'll definitely buy these again and strongly recommend them to anyone looking for something more interesting than a chip, but still desiring the same salty and crispy aspects. I bet these would go great with guacamole as well or a sour cream-based dip. The only thing I wish was so was that these were lower in fat and less caloric. That's mainly so I could feel good about eating them from a nutritional viewpoint rather than only from a satisfaction perspective.

Lawson VL 24 Vegetable and Fruit Juice Blend

There is a particular variety of jam that I love in apricot flavor. On at least 5 occasions, I have accidentally purchased orange marmalade in the same brand because the illustrations are nearly identical and I was in a hurry and didn't read the label. Today's review is brought to you by the same type of rushed carelessness that has seen me waste about $20 over the years on marmalade (which I hate).



I was at a local shop and hustling to get some milk when I decided I'd like some juice. I'd bought a Lawson VL (Value Line) citrus blend from this same shop before so I grabbed the carton you see above large based on the prominence of the orange, lemon and grapes. I got home and only when my sunny yellow juice ended up being fluorescent orange did I realize something had gone horribly wrong. Still, I wasn't going to let good juice go to waste because I made a stupid mistake, even if it did look a little radioactive.

The 24 fruits and vegetables pictured on the carton.

The juice blends grape, orange, and lemon with a plethora of vegetables in an attempt to add more nutritional punch to the mix. The primary ingredients are the first three juices, but there's also 2 types of carrot, sweet potato, asparagus, 2 types of green pepper, 2 kinds of cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, pumpkin, lettuce, kale, parsley, celery, and radish. There are a few more in there, but you get the idea. The Japanese love drinks and juices which offer tons of healthy ingredients. I guess it's the "kitchen sink" approach to beverage blending and consumers lap it up. I'm not sure if this sort of approach ends up in a tasty beverage, but I guess it is supposed to be about carrying a big nutritional punch. My previous experience with a blended beverage was not one which I recollect with fondness, so I approached with caution.

The juice doesn't have a very strong scent. Mainly, you smell the orange component with a hint of lemon. The juice itself tastes a lot like a muted version of orange juice. It has a citrus feel, but is clearly diluted with something unexpected. While there isn't really an aftertaste, there is definitely a secondary hint of something vegetable-based. I swear I can detect the green pepper taste in it, but none of the other vegetables make an individual taste impact. I think this is certainly palatable, but I wouldn't go so far to say it is as enjoyable as a pure citrus blend or even straight ahead orange juice.

The carton has 700 ml, which is probably enough for 3 reasonably-sized servings, 2 big ones, or 4 small ones. The juice has added alpha and beta carotene and is 36 calories for 100 ml so it's not too high in calories, though certainly not low. If you'd like to drink something which may carry more nutrients per sip, this would be just fine. You're taking a cut in pleasure, but it's still a pleasant beverage and it may be worth it for the healthier mix of juices.

Vegips (Sweet Potato and Pumpkin Chips)

Vegetables are good. Sweet potato and pumpkin are even better when you're thinking of vegetables. In fact, I often think of sweet potato as the "candy" of vegetables. When I saw this bag of "Vegips", I thought it'd be tasty and nutritious. The claim on the package is that they are "light and delicious". It also lets you know that these are real vegetable slices rather than reconstituted vegetable product (a la Pringles). That'll teach me a lesson in checking the nutrition information on the back of the bag before buying the product.

The "chips" part of Vegips is out in full force. These are not dehydrated or baked healthy chips. They are deep fried like the dreaded potato chip. This small bag (45 grams/1. 6 oz.) contains 16.2 grams of fat, 26 grams of carbohydrate, and 4 mg of salt. This means they weigh in pretty heavy calorically at 256 calories for this bag which one can easily polish off in one sitting. To off-set the fat, you get a paltry 1.6 grams of protein and I'm guessing whatever nutritional gains from the sweet potatoes and pumpkin survive the frying process.


The bag contains about 10 of each type of chip in whole or in fragments. When you open it, it smells like squash. The pumpkin is definitely the more flavorful and dominant chip among the two. It's important to note that Japanese pumpkin, kaboucha (かぼちゃ), is not the same as American pumpkin. It tastes more squash-like and the flavor is a bit more intense. They're both good, but a different taste experience.

I tried a pumpkin chip first and it tasted nicely of pumpkin but there was an oddly familiar taste with it. I couldn't pin it down at first and then I realized that it's oil. In fact, it tastes a bit like "old" oil. The chip is super crispy and a little thick but not dense. It fact, it breaks off very nicely. I think that the oil flavor is so strong because they must be saturated with oil to get a proper texture. After eating a few, the oil flavor tends to become more muted. This might be because it seems to coat your tongue. I found that there is a bit of a residue in my mouth after eating these chips.

I was looking forward to the sweet potato more than the pumpkin and it had the same good, crunchy texture as the pumpkin chip and was cut slightly thinner. The first chip didn't seem to have much sweet potato flavor and seemed more like a regular chip but after eating a few, the sweet potato flavor emerged more strongly. The oil taste seemed less oppressive, but still present. The sweet potato chip loses a bit more in the translation from real vegetable to chip in my opinion. I found myself wishing the chip had retained more of its sweet potato essence. Both types of chips are very lightly salted and I think the sweet potato one probably suffers a bit for not having more salt. A bit more seasoning would probably give the flavor more definition.

These chips contain very few ingredients. Essentially, they consist of sweet potatoes, vegetable oil, and pumpkin. Note that the ingredients are in order from highest volume to lowest. That means there is more oil than pumpkin! There are no chemicals and no extra flavoring and that would be refreshing if they weren't so full of fat. A bag of these cost me 168 yen ($1.58 USD), which is slightly expensive for such a small portion. If these weren't so fatty, I'd happily have them regularly despite the oily aftertaste. They really are much tastier and more flavorful than regular chips.