If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen an ad for Bokksu many times. I know a lot of youtubers that have been sponsored by them and honestly I understand why. It’s a very appealing service, getting a box of snacks from Japan sent right to your door? Sign me up. Well, I waited a bit before signing up, honestly. It is a lot of money and understandably so. It has to be shipped around the world after all. I was worried about added tax and the quality of delivery so although I was tempted a few times to get a box, I didn’t do so until very recently. You see, since I became a teacher, I started earning more. Not enough to move out – at least not in this economy – but enough to have some disposable income. So I finally decided to order some boxes. The ads make it look very appealing, but advertisers embellish. I even watched a video with my first year students today about how Burger King is getting sued for lying a little bit too much about their products in their ads.
So let’s go over the financial questions I had first. I was worried that there would be extra costs upon importing. I’ve been burned by that before and I’ve gotten quite wary about buying things in other countries now. To my surprise I found that not only was shipping free, but there were no extra costs and the box made it all the way to my door without interruptions. Now I don’t know if that’s just me getting lucky, but assuming there’s no extra surprise import taxes at all, that’s a big bonus. That way the price at checkout is actually indicative of the total costs and I don’t feel scammed when I have to pay three extra layers of tax later on and end up going over my budget. So that was a big relief. Now I can actually dive into the snacks without starting from a state of annoyance.
I started with some of the snacks from the Hello Kitty box that was currently free with orders. I have nothing with Hello Kitty, but the snacks are still snacks. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I had mixed expectations. I don’t really buy the idea that all of these come from small scale sellers, but some probably do. What I think – and what the consensus seems to be – is that there’s some special, hand crafted cool snacks and then the rest is probably filled with more generic snacks. That’s not a bad thing per se, if you had to think of 20+ unique snacks every month you’d probably run out of ideas pretty quickly. What matters to me is if there’s some interesting snacks I can’t get here easily and if the overall quality is good. So how are the snacks?
I tried the senbei rice cracker and was very pleasantly surprised. It’s one of those snacks that looks cool but I had really no idea what to expect and if I would like it. I then tried some of the mochi snacks which were great. I had mochi once before so I was pretty confident I would enjoy it. And I did. There was a strawberry chocolate snack that was great and just today before writing this post I tried out the Macha chocolate cake which was really good. There were some snacks that were less interesting. Some of the smaller cookies weren’t all that special, I feel like I could get something similar here in the Netherlands. The pear cookies were interesting enough but we get similar cookies with chocolate (kind of like oreos) so there’s nothing crazy there.
I haven’t tried the tea yet, but seeing that I’m not a big tea person, I doubt it would be a big selling point for me. All things considered it looks like each box probably has a handful of nice, unique snacks, then a bunch of less unique but still good snacks and perhaps a third or less are snacks I don’t really care for.
So why did I make this post? I don’t know. I just wanted to give you my unbiased opinion on Bokksu since my only real experience with it were mainly sponsored posts, which are obviously biased. I’ll keep renewing for a few months although I might try out other boxes. I doubt there’s much difference in snack quality between boxes, but some of the boxes also offer a small household item and that is something I’d really like. That way even when you finish the snacks, you still get something you can keep. If I do end up swapping I’ll report back to you folks about it. If you have any experiences yourself with one of these boxes, please let me know in the comments down below, I’d love to be more informed about which ones I should give a try. And as always, thanks for eating.
Opal Kaharis 