Izumi Seika Mugi Mugi Cocoa Cereal Snack

When I was a child, my mother used to buy "Popeye's" puffed wheat and rice cereal. It came in plastic bags with a picture of Popeye smiling his bizarre grimace in the middle. Both of these cereals had several things in common. One factor was that they were very simple types of cereal. There were no heart-, clover-, or star-shaped marshmallows. They didn't turn your milk funny colors or leave a sugary sludge in the bottom of the bowl. They didn't even crunch. The primary reason my mother bought them was that they were insanely cheap. While they were also very low calorie (about 50 calories for 1-2 cups).

The Japanese aren't much for cereal. In fact, they have the puniest cereal sections you're likely to see in any developed country. I've spoken to many Japanese folks about what they eat for breakfast and why they aren't fans of cereal. Mainly, I'm told that it doesn't fill them up. You know what? They're right. Cereal doesn't fill me up either and I rarely eat it. My husband loves to eat it as a late-night snack, but I tend to just avoid it altogether.

Though the Japanese aren't eating their puffed grains cereal for breakfast, they do sometimes eat it as a snack, especially if they're still among the short pants wearing set. Enter this puffed wheat snack, which doesn't have Popeye's ugly mug on it, but it has an apparently animate stalk of wheat that is interested in enjoying a cup of cocoa.

Unlike the spinach-loving, muscle-bound sailor's puffed wheat cereal, this stuff is not low calorie. A 40-gram serving has 170 calories. It's not only the carbohydrate goodness adding much need bulk to your fat cells, but the ton of sugar and vegetable oil they add to the recipe. Not to worry though, this also includes your RDA of Sucralose so that it's sweeter without adding in more calories.

As for as snacks go, this is, essentially, chocolate cereal. The back of the bag shows that you can add milk to it or sprinkle it on ice cream. However, it's also intended to just be eaten out of the bag as a somewhat crispy, somewhat soft snack. It's lightly sweet with a mild, but appreciable cocoa flavor. It's sweet enough without being cloying so that you won't have that "icky" overly sugary feel in your mouth if you do just eat it out of the package. It also has a nice "wheaty" kick to it that adds some depth to the flavor. I like that sort of whole grain flavor, even when mixed with chocolate and sugar.

The strange thing about this product is that the manufacturer seems to have very recently terminated its confectionary division. That means that this may well have been their last foray into making chocolate cereal treats. Given that this is nothing special, I wouldn't be surprised if sales weren't over the top spectacular. The company's main deal seems to be simply selling wheat.

I liked this fine, but I wasn't over the moon about it. If I was still a kid and eating cereal, I'd be all over this compared to my bland, boring Popeye options. Since I'm not a child anymore, this is okay, but nothing to get excited about.

Random Picture #80

The Daiso is a 100-yen shop chain which is scattered all over Japan and even has a few branches in the United States. Each Daiso carries a slightly different selection than any other in my experience. This is based largely on location. The very large shop closest to my home sells no food whatsoever because it is located on the second floor of a supermarket and my guess is an arrangement was made so the low-cost foodstuffs sometimes carried at Daiso wouldn't compete with the pricier items in the market.

I recently discovered a small Daiso in the basement of an office building not too far from one of my workplaces. This one carries a great many snacks, instant food items, and drinks. I bought some instant vanilla coffee there which totally blew in terms of taste (it tastes like cheap vanilla candles smell). I did not purchase, but took a picture to note, this very odd combination of flavors. I'm all onboard with chocolate and fruit flavors in general, but melon cocoa sounds like a pretty disgusting pairing to me.

Excellent Cocoa Daifuku

My husband is a very conservative eater. It's only in the last few years that he's come around to liking traditional Japanese sweets, and even now he doesn't tend to desire them enough to actually buy them. Mainly, he'll just eat them if a student gives them to him as a gift. Because of his conservative nature, I was a little surprised when he suggested that we buy this box of daifuku sweets. Daifuku are made with mochi (pounded rice cake) and usually filled with sweetened beans.

We found this box of "Excellent" cocoa daifuku at a souvenir shop at Meiji Shrine. There are 10 little blobs in the box. Each is about the size of the tip of your thumb. Because this is a bit of a "luxury" sweet, it was slightly expensive at around 1200 yen ($14.34). They're made by a company which I can best translate to "Ander HSK". The company didn't have a web site so I couldn't find any further information.

While these may look like a lot of little cocoa powder covered chocolate truffles, they're very soft and squishy. The outer mochi is so soft that it feels a bit like a membrane surrounding a firm blog of chocolate ganache in the center. They smell like cocoa powder, and it's impossible to take out out of the box without getting said powder all over your fingers. Because they are so limp, you have to pinch them to get them out.

The mochi mainly lends a soft slightly chewy texture. The flavor is of good quality somewhat dark chocolate that is lightly sweet. These are excellent and if you're squeamish about making a foray into traditional Japanese sweets, these are about as accessible as daifuku are going to be for a Western palate.

I wish I could offer information on other outlets for these sweets other than one souvenir shop at Meiji Shrine because that makes it sound like it can only be found if you happen to be a tourist in Japan, but the lack of web presence of the company makes it impossible to make other concrete recommendations. There's a high likelihood that you can find these in department store basements, where vast quantities of premium traditional Japanese treats can be purchased. If you can find these, I can't recommend them highly enough.

Senjaku Diet Cocoa Candy

Back when I was working in a Japanese company, one of the office ladies used to keep a box of cocoa in the kitchen. It was in a brown box with gold writing in katakana (the phonetic alphabet for foreign words) which said "Cocoa". I never sampled that cocoa, as I wasn't a break room thief and I wasn't fond of chocolate milk. My coworkers, on the other hand, often stole my milk and mayonnaise when it suited them. That cocoa box design closely resembled the one on this package of hard candies, but it was made by Morinaga. I wonder if this is meant to bring to mind that cocoa powder which is made by a much better known company than Senjaku.

This is the first product I've reviewed by Senjaku. They make a limited, but not exceptionally narrow line of candies which mainly consists of hard candies, but there are also some gummies and pressed sugary powder candies. The company is relatively small with only 175 employees. The company makes a point of mentioning that 103 of them are women, but I'm not sure why that is relevant. In their "Diet" candy line, they have green tea, coffee, and this cocoa candy.

I found these at Seiyu supermarket for 168 yen ($1.80) for an 88 gram (3.1 oz.) bag. I looked long and hard before I bought them because "diet" often means very little in Japan. The bag says that there is a 20% calorie reduction for these candies compared to conventional types. There are 22 individually wrapped candies in the bag and each is 12.5 calories. Part of the promotional information for this states that it contains 295 mg. of Polyphenols. These are the antioxidants that are in things like coffee, wine and nuts. Of course, that number is for the entire bag.

One interesting thing about these is that they actually have their ingredients written in both Japanese and English. The first is hydrogenated glucose syrup, which I hadn't heard of before. Some research revealed that this is a modified starch which is used in sugar-free candies (and is similar to Maltitol). The second ingredient is corn syrup, which isn't surprising since I think that it's impossible to make hard candies without some sugar. Other ingredients are whey powder, cocoa powder, polydextrose, vegetable oil, cocoa paste, aspartame, and flavoring.

Unsurprisingly, these don't smell like much of anything, but a few moments on the tongue reveal a rich, deep cocoa flavor. The taste is amazingly deep and broad for a hard candy which has no milk products. It tastes like a cup of hot cocoa that is rich and chocolatey. My mouth was full for the duration with the loveliest flavor which carried just a hint of liqueur. I'm guessing the vegetable oil adds a real richness to the taste since the fat can likely be detected. Unlike many hard candies in Japan which are slick and super smooth, these have a bit of a rough texture to the candy. This in no way undermines the experience. In fact, I think it makes the sense of chocolate consumption more palpable.

These were incredible for a hard candy. After the first one, I wanted to run back to Seiyu and buy up their entire stock while they still had them available. It's so often the case that I find something I really like once and never see it again, particularly if it is made by a smaller manufacturer. If you like rich hot cocoa, and want something to give you the flavor of a cup of it without the calories (and the texture and fullness), by all means try these.

Bakauke Cocoa Sembei

I've had wonderful experiences with Bakauke sembei and was drawn to this cocoa sembei the minute I saw it. If nothing else, I love the package design. The mascots in black look beautiful against the sea of dark cocoa powder and the gold lettering adds a sense that these are going to be rich and chocoaltey. All in all, one expects a pretty high class experience.

I found these at the discount snack shop, Okashi no Machioka. They were 178 yen ($1.95) for a bag of 18 crackers (9 packs of 2 rice crackers). I was further intrigued by these because each 2-pack is only 33.6 calories (yes, it actually says "point six" in the nutritional information). Chocolate treats for a low calorie cost has convinced more than one woman to sample a food hoping to find the holy grail of chocolate; that is, the enjoyment without the high price of cocoa-based goodness.


Each cracker is fairly generously sized, and smells faintly of cocoa powder. They don't have any of the telltale smells one associates with rice crackers or baked rice products. The taste is relatively mild in some ways, and somewhat blunt in others. The cocoa flavor is pure, like cocoa powder, but there is relatively little sweetness and salt. This makes the experience feel somewhat flat when you aren't hitting on a pocket of salt on the exterior of the cracker. Both sugar and salt enhance flavor, and I think this really could have benefited from a bit more of one, the other or both.

I wanted to like these. They have a great texture and aroma. They're low in calories and sugar (they're made with Sucralose artificial sweetener) and they have lots of cocoa. Despite having all the components one might want, it just didn't come together to please my taste buds. The flavor was just too thin. I'll certainly finish the bag, but I won't buy them again.

If you're interested in downloading desktop pictures of each calendar month from Bakauke featuring their mascots, you can get one here.

Cocoa Sakuri (rice crackers)

For the longest time, I have resisted the discordant harmonies of sugary sembei. I'm sure that there are many people who react to chocolate-covered potato chips in the same way. You grow accustomed to consuming a food prepared and spiced in a particular way, and it just seems too freaky having it sweet if it's usually savory or vice versa. However, one of my commenters encouraged me to be more adventurous and I have not been steered wrong by my commenters to date.


There are a lot of different sembei streaked with sugar in a way that resembles, well, let's just say you can choose one of two bodily fluids and use your imagination. The packaging just doesn't make it look very appealing because they adjust the saturation so that the sugar streaks look whiter than they really are. In real life, at least in the case of this cocoa version, they look like diseased pustules.

As our mothers told us, it's not fair to judge a book by it's cover so I picked these up for 188 yen (about $1.80) at the local supermarket. The entire bag is 60 grams (2.1 oz.) and has perhaps 12 or so 5 cm. (2 in.) in diameter crackers. If you put away the whole bag, it's 268 calories. Each cracker is individually wrapped to keep it crispy and fresh. These are made by Kameida Seika, and I chose these expressly because I've reviewed their sembei many times before and had very favorable responses. They do good work.


When you open the package and give a cracker a good, deep sniff, you smell cocoa. The ingredients include cocoa powder, almonds, cocoa nibs, and, of course, rice and sugar. Small amounts of crushed almonds are inside the cracker. The outside is "whipped sugar". When you bite into the cracker, you get a nice hit of cocoa and the nibs. The distinctive flavor of sembei is muted by the sugar and chocolate, but it does come through as an aftertaste.

These are very crispy and have a great texture. The chocolate in them is not rich because there is no cocoa butter in them. It's very much a chocolate cracker and not like a cookie though it is pleasantly sweet. The flavor is unusual, but very pleasing. I really, really enjoyed these and I'd certainly buy them again and strongly recommend giving them a try.