Welcome to the 2024 Conbini Awards!
Every year, Japan's convenience stores and packaged food companies attempt to sate the nation's voracious appetite for novelty goods by releasing a slew of products that you or I might consider weird as fuck.
I just spent a month there, and snapped a photo of my favorite head scratchers:
If it's not clear what you're looking at, here's a brief rundown of what each of these is (or purports to be):
- Candy that's shaped, sized, and flavored like peanuts and which features peanut-like crunchiness. (Why not just eat peanuts, though?)
- "Chiizu-tara", a common Japanese snack that sandwiches cheese with fish paste. This one is co-branded with a popular delivery pizza chain and flavored like spicy sausage
- Gummies colored and shaped as sliced bell peppers (always referred to as paprika in Japanese), flavored as savory consommé broth, with vegetable content equivalent to one serving of lettuce
- "Delicious tomato" flavored alcoholic chuuhai cocktail in a can, exclusive to Japan's northern Touhoku region
- Gummies shaped like salmon nigiri, where the salmon pieces are orange-flavored and the rice is yogurt-flavored
- Another alcoholic chuuhai, this one flavored after Suntory's Dekavita C beverage, a long-running vitamin C, B, niacin, and amino acids supplement. Get healthy and drunk in one step!
- Toma'nade, which is like a cursed Arnold Palmer and contains a full tomato but an unspecified amount of lemons
- Gummies shaped like bisected soft-boiled eggs. They're flavored like white grapes, and the package reassures the consumer that they are not egg flavored
- Jelly sparkling grape drink. You are meant to shake it ten times and then let the juicy-jelly find its way down your gullet, I guess
- French fry and hamburger flavored potato chips are all the rage this year (I found at least three kinds of each), but far-and-away, the winner was this one modeled after Wendy's limited edition "Wild Rock" burger from 2017, which featured two burger patties in lieu of buns (like a beef equivalent to KFC's Double Down). Again, this isn't that, these are potato chips modeled after an off-brand hypothetical burger that looks just like the Wendy's Wild Rock burger. Also, to be clear, the potato chips are neither a low-carb or high-protein snack, they are simply meant to have a taste that's evocative of burger meat. I can't stress that enough