The Best Japanese Snacks, Ranked by a Shop That Ships Them From Tokyo

Search "best Japanese snacks" and you get the same twenty listicles, most of them written by people who have never stood in a Japanese supermarket. We pack Japanese snacks into boxes in Tokyo every month, which means we buy them, taste them, and argue about them constantly. This is our ranking — with the reasoning, and with the ones we think are overrated.

The Ranking

• 1
  Popin' Cookin' (Kracie)

  A powder kit that you mix with water and turn into miniature sushi, ramen, or a bento. It is the only thing on this list where the eating is not really the point — the making is. That is also why it travels so well as a gift: you are handing someone twenty minutes of activity, not a bag of sugar. Flavour is fine, not remarkable. Ranked first because nothing else here does something a Western snack aisle does not already do.
• 2
  Umaibo (Yaokin)

  A puffed corn stick the length of your hand, sold for around ten or twenty yen in Japan, in flavours that range from corn potage to mentaiko to takoyaki. It is the single best value item in Japanese snacking and the flavour range is genuinely absurd. The catch: it is mostly air and it crushes. If you order these online and they arrive intact, someone packed them carefully.
• 3
  Hi-Chew (Morinaga)

  Chewy fruit candy with a texture somewhere between taffy and gum, except it dissolves instead of turning into a wad. Morinaga has had decades to get the fruit flavours right and it shows — the green apple and the Japan-only seasonal fruits are the ones worth hunting. The most likely snack on this list to convert someone who says they don't like Japanese candy.
• 4
  Kit Kat, Japanese regional flavours (Nestlé Japan)

  Everyone has heard about matcha Kit Kats. The interesting ones are the regional editions sold mainly in one part of the country — Shizuoka wasabi, Hokkaido melon, Tokyo Banana. Ranked below the top three because the hype outruns the product: some flavours are excellent and some taste like a novelty item, and you cannot tell which from the box. Buy a mixed set, not a single flavour, the first time.
• 5
  Kinoko no Yama / Takenoko no Sato (Meiji)

  Chocolate mushrooms and chocolate bamboo shoots — a biscuit stem with a chocolate cap. Japan has argued about which one is better for roughly fifty years, which tells you something about how ordinary and beloved they are. Reliable, cheap, and instantly readable to anyone. Chocolate means summer shipping is a real problem, so this is a cold-months snack if it is crossing an ocean.
• 6
  Nerunerunerune (Kracie)

  The colour-changing DIY candy that made the whole category famous — you stir two powders together and the mixture fizzes and turns blue or purple. The chemistry is the appeal. As a snack, it is sour sugar and not much else, which is why it sits here rather than near the top. As a thing to hand a nine-year-old, it is very hard to beat.
• 7
  Jagariko (Calbee)

  Potato sticks in a cup, dense and crunchy rather than crisp, in flavours like salad, cheese, and butter soy sauce. The cup is the reason it works — it survives a bag, a backpack, and a shipping box better than any crisp on this list. Savoury, so it is a useful counterweight if everything else you are eating is sweet.
• 8
  Super Lemon (Nobel)

  A hard candy with a sour powder coating so aggressive that the packet carries a warning about it. The first ten seconds are genuinely unpleasant and then it settles into an ordinary lemon drop. This is a dare, not a snack, and it is on this list because that is exactly what people want it for. Searches for it have climbed noticeably in the last year.
• 9
  Puchao (UHA Mikakuto)

  Chewy candy with tiny gummy pieces suspended inside it, so you get two textures in one bite. Less famous abroad than Hi-Chew and, on the fruit flavours, arguably better. The most underrated thing on this list — it rarely appears in "best Japanese snacks" articles and we have never seen anyone try it and shrug.
• 10
  Pocky (Glico)

  Biscuit sticks dipped in chocolate. Ranked last on purpose. Pocky is excellent and it is also the one Japanese snack you can already buy in a Western supermarket, which makes it a strange thing to import. Worth it only for the Japan-only flavours — the regional ones and the thicker "Bakauke" style variants. If someone sends you a Japanese snack box that is mostly Pocky, you have been sold shelf filler.

What Didn't Make the List

Three categories get recommended constantly and we left them out on purpose.

If You're Buying for the First Time

A practical order of operations, if you are starting from zero:

If you would rather not assemble that yourself, that is essentially what a monthly box is for — someone in Japan picks a spread, including at least a couple of DIY kits, and sends it with an English guide. We wrote a full comparison of where to buy Japanese snacks online if you want to weigh that against ordering piece by piece, and a separate ranking of every Popin' Cookin' kit if the DIY side is what interests you.

Common Questions