21 Must Try Japanese CONVENIENCE Store Foods & Drinks

hcp what could it possibly mean so this is it the very best sweet snacks confectionary drinks that you can find in japan's convenience stores we're going to take you on a journey through them all today but first you're probably wondering what does hcp actually stand for now for some context i bought this bag this tote bag from the 100 yen store just yesterday at daiso or as it likes to call itself the life coordinate shop i was there to coordinate my life with cheap bags but just because something's cheap it doesn't need to mean that the brand is bad even though in this case it most certainly is because it turns out hcp stands for it's written down here i like hamburgers i like chicken nuggets i like potatoes potatoes spelt wrong yes finally a bag that speaks to me with the first three sentences to come out of my mouth on a romantic first date the date it doesn't last very long now japanese convenience stores they don't require much of an introduction but today i want to share with you guys 21 must-try items that you can find at larson's family mart 7-eleven they're either things that i eat and enjoy every day all the things that i've chosen for quirky branding designs and packaging admittedly not all of the things here are good but they are still things that you need to try at least once but this whole video will culminate in me trying the thing that i've waited for my entire life and that is family mart potato chips they said it couldn't be done to combine the rich juicy flavor of chicken with crisps but it has been done and i look forward to trying those at the end of the video now i know what you're probably thinking that's a lot of food that's probably just what he eats on an average lunch time to which i say how dare you uh although it doesn't bode well but i'm about to eat this under the watchful eye of big mouth an artistic interpretation of what i apparently look like in manga form they captured my face well i'll give them that not so sure about the big round bowling ball [ __ ] body but to be fair at the end of this video i'll probably look like that anyway right let's dive in see what we can find so one of the most interesting aspects of japanese candy uh is that they like to combine some kind of medicinal quality into the products now in the us you have nyquil in the uk we have rehypnol and here in japan they of course have gaba for sleep gaba for sleep now this is the one product i'm actually gonna save to last and i don't wanna fall asleep and face plant the table and turn into a snoring wreck but gaba it is in fact an acronym just like the acronym we saw earlier hcp except this one is good because it doesn't mean potatoes chicken and burgers gaba means gamma-aminobutric acid yeah my favorite gamma-aminobutric acid is actually a transmitter that sends chemical messages through the brain and gaba inhibits or reduces the activity of neurons or nerve cells so that's great isn't it who needs drugs in japan we've got gaba for sleep continuing the theme of chocolate that pretends to be healthy and maybe it is who knows we'll find out later uh is libera for the longest time i thought that said liberia the african nation of liberia because one of japan's other biggest chocolate products is of course ghana a tribute to the country of ghana and it's uh coco beans so i thought oh it's liberia it's not it's just libera so important distinction there but liberta pretends to be a chocolate that's good for you it says here shibuya literally reduces the absorption of fat and sugar you know what i was going to go to the gym today but instead i'll eat liberty i mean if you want to reduce the absorption of fat and sugar maybe maybe don't eat chocolate but i guess the idea is to make you feel less guilty when you eat it when you enjoy it as i'm about to do right now come in this sort of cube form little little cubes of chocolate what i can feel the fat on the sugar like melting away good god that's bollocks isn't it tastes good though tastes good now because i'm a healthy individual i'm going to wash down this tasty liberal chocolate with my favorite coca-cola plus uh don't worry coca-cola it's not typically associated as being a healthy drink right but this coca-cola plus which you can only get in japan and a few other countries in asia it's got dextrin in it a lot of dextrin which is a dietary fibre supposed to help you not absorb fat and it says on the bottle here one of these a day with your meal it will help with reducing fat absorption so you know between this and this by the end of this video gonna be a new man who needs lettuce and exercise when you've got chocolate and coke tastes awful absolutely awful bollocks if you want to be healthy avoid that at all costs next up it's time for something good and that is cream colon cream colon it's a clever name because cream colon is actually a medical condition you'll get if you eat too much cream colon the product the product becomes the affliction it says on the box here fragrant milk the best kind of milk there is and otona literally adult milk which sounds very suspicious but it's quite common in japan to see that otona here this is adult chocolate mint it's quite common to see adult being used on branding and marketing of products because it's got a sort of adult taste to it that if children eat they'll explode into a thousand pieces but let's dive in let's try some otuna milk cream colomb look at that nice box design i like that big fan i mean it sounds awful but it it it does it is like a colon like a little piece of a slice of colon filled with cream when you think about it like that doesn't doesn't sound good but it tastes really great cream column definitely get it just don't eat too many less you get cream cola the most delicious affliction you can get next up we all know the youtuber pewdiepie but have you met his japanese brother genji pie yes that's right it's genji pie made as it says here from the finest ingredients of wheat flour margarine sugar and more don't stop there i want to know all the ingredients why not make your tea time more delightful with genji the heartwarming pie and there's not just one genji pie there's 28 in one bag you get more bang for your buck in this genji pie than you do perhaps than any other product here and what i like about them is they're heart shaped because if you eat all the genji pies in this bag you will need a new heart they go hand in hand with cream colon the ultimate combo there's cream colon all over the table now probably the messiest thing i'll buy today as well genji pie like a little baked treat haven't have one of these in years actually the only people i see he buy these are like 85 years old and they put them on the table so when guests come you can eat them for something that's been in that bag probably like six months it does still taste pretty fresh it's quite soft and pleasant so do pewdiepie proud get him some genji pine now continuing along the theme of uh baked goods for a moment when i was a kid one of my favorite things it was biscuits custard creams two little biscuits with cream in beautiful loved it had it every day the perfect dinner all the nutrition you could want in japan though custard creams have a rather different name and a rather more exciting name because custard creams are called sugar butter sand tree delicious you had me at butter sand uh which sounds like the last thing you eat when stranded on a desert island oh [ __ ] look at that now that is a custard cream that's sugar butter sandwich if you're going to be pedam tick but it's pretty good the biscuits are very buttery in the cream it's up there with cream cola and there's a mess all over the table now [ __ ] when you walk into pretty much any convenience store in japan you all come face to face with a fridge filled with what looks like lots of little medicine bottles and it can be quite intimidating to come to grips with what these things are you know for the longest time i thought they were all medicine of some sort but the truth is while many of these items are made by pharmaceutical companies they're actually just energy drinks in disguise and even a magic witch's potion that will get rid of your hangover and so it's to this place of magic and wonder that we now turn our attention so imagine you're tired and you need to wake up in a hurry and you've got no access for whatever reason to coffee or cocaine what you need is this all these little bottles here this is the porbitan d and it is all the excitement of red bull in a tiny form factor in a glass bottle gives the illusion of being some kind of medicine but actually it's incredibly potent when you drink this you will be able to see through space and time for about 25 minutes and then the caffeine and the taurine will wear off you wish you'd never been born and it oh crikey it smells a bit like red bull but more purified so um yeah be careful with this if you have two of these you will probably have lots of heart palpitations but one's all right one will wake you up and it's very sharp and sour next up is auronomian they've all got really awkward names deporbitan or ronamin but this is kind of a less caffeine filled drink it's lots of vitamin c basically if you want a dose of vitamin c this is the thing you drink it's got a nice sort of addictive taste smells like lemonade mixed with honey mixed with caffeine this tries to bill itself as more of a health drink than the porbitan d i drink this quite a lot to be fair but i need to be pepped up a little bit it's not as bad as this one so heart palpitations a nice afternoon auronomian sees my preferable drink moving on we do of course have energy jelly now i drink elegy jelly do we drink do you eat energy jelly i'm not really sure what it is of all the things you could buy in a japanese convenience store this is probably the thing i've bought the most over the years when i used to go to school in the mornings when i was a teacher i would pull into a 7-eleven i would get an iced coffee and then i would plunge my hand into the fridge and get one of these bad boys and it's the energy of like an onigiri rice ball uh but in a sort of jelly form factor and of course it's the inspiration for the great dr jelly uh because on the original journey across japan i've basically lived off these things for about six weeks don't let these be a diet supplement don't supplement this for actual healthy normal real food but every now and then it's quite good um it's a taste of taste of grapes as well there's even a special energy jelly filled with protein protein 5000 a reference there to the 5 000 milligrams of protein um not a very nice flavor avoid that one the craziest thing is despite shouting out all these energy jellies literally creating a character for them that they could monetize and exploit they weren't interested i think we even messaged them once emailed them and nothing so if anybody from mordinaga corporations watching i'm your guy well dr jelly is a guy but i'm his manager so contact me first now in a moment i'm going to take one for the team by drinking one cup sake god forbid but before that earlier on i mentioned these were like a witch's potion this is basically so you drink it before you drink alcohol so you'll see a lot of salarymen down these on a night out before they go off and have a hard heavy night out this helps you metabolize the drinks quicker so they pass through you quicker and you have less of a hangover afterwards it tastes a little bit like red bull but more bitter i feel that it's like a bright yellow oh god oh it's so bitter oh god this is the this is the super edition i've got three different types of ukulele here that's autumn flavor and this is which is like [ __ ] super level so this is like a seven out of ten this is like a 12 out of 10. they they love doing this with browning in japan though to make it seem really powerful and tough i think for some people it might actually work it hasn't really worked for me but then i do drink a lot more than most japanese folks do most people in japan they get drunk very quickly so maybe it works if you don't drink that much why am i drinking it oh yeah because it's time lord have mercy on my soul this is this is the the bit i've been dreading actually um of the entire show actually no tell a lie the onigiri spam edition that's probably my greatest fear now this is sake in one cup pretty self-explanatory it looks like water you can trick yourself into thinking it's water but it's not water it doesn't taste as good as water i hate one cup sake the reason it's on the list though is you've got to try it once you've got to have it one time everyone that's come japan has to say they've tried one cup sake at least once and uh [ __ ] sake you know i'm gonna have a small one i love the baby one it's kind of got like a sour bitter smell to it and uh oh [ __ ] sake no it's not good like it's like someone's put a knife through your tongue and then it sort of works its way to the back of your throat and you start to wish you'd never been born oh and now i'm going to ruin my day even more with one cup suck it premium surely it can't be as bad as that one be advised the ring pull thing it doesn't really work it just goes everywhere all over your brand new table all right here we go one cup sake premium cheers it smells slightly sweeter than that one so let's say here there's more flavor i think that's worse i think it's actually worse how can that be worse it's worse it's like even more bitter it's off flipping it i want to wash my mouth out with something good now what i've got here is the first drink i ever got truly addicted to in japan yes that's right it's cece lemon cece lemon is like the person at the party that brags about getting the nice car 34 lemons worth of vitamin c 34 lemons in this one bottle i always picture like a man in a factory somewhere in shikoku just turning a lemon getting the lemons there's no lemons really there is it's just powder but anyway this is the the first drink i got addicted to in japan when i was a teacher just outside the staff room there was a vending machine and this caught my eye i mean it's very eye-catching isn't it it's bright it's bright yellow lots of lemons lots of big numbers 34 lemons at the time i couldn't read japanese now i can and i can tell you that on the bottle it's got one percent fruit juice in it one percent lemons that's not very good is it let's dive in ah it's very sweet very nostalgic but it's basically just sugar water with vitamin c added in healthy it is not delicious yes it is now earlier on we saw adult taste chocolate but now it's time for another intimidating type of candy and in this case with cola bottles but not just any cola bottles because these are color up the heart go [ __ ] yourself they're so hard apparently it says here if you don't like hard gummy sweets you can [ __ ] off don't need these it might not say that word for word this is the guy looking for a fight outside of a nightclub you stare at him too long he's gonna come for you that's how i feel staring at this intimidated there's even a scale on the back scale that goes from one to five showing soft to hard and color up the hard is so high it's off the charts they've created a five plus scale i don't know whether to eat it or where it is body armor let's dive in a tiny cola bottle so hard it to be fair it's pretty hard they smell like coca-cola mixed with shoe polish but how do they taste let's dive in here we go this is it oh it's it's it's generally quite hard actually i mean it is a five on the charts [ __ ] on who wants this who eats such chewy gummy sweets like oh crikey it was so chewy that i just gave up and just swallowed the damn thing whole they are hard it's hard by name hard by nature color up the heart go [ __ ] yourself my mouth is now very sugary i want something salty and savoury and for that we've got one of my favorite snacks in all of japan umaibo literally tasty stick in my ball so these cost like 10 yen they're absurdly cheap like 10 cents and what it is is basically a giant bloated cheeto so it's just a big cheesy stick but actually pretty good they're really nice and they've got different flavors so this one's cheese flavor this one is takoyaki fried octopus ball flavor this one salad flavor yeah i'll put that one over there this is the one to go for cheesy flavor they're great they're really great look at this imagine the thrills of cheetos but reasonably priced and in a cute and convenient form factor you know it is in effect just a bloated cheeto a bit like that guy over there on the shelf now the next product is technologically incredible it's up there with the jet engine and the saturn v rocket and cut noodles is galbo now when i was a teacher i keep saying when i was a teacher but a lot of these foods are connected to my first sort of memories living in japan when i was a teacher in the staff room in the summer months it got to about 36 degrees celsius and they for some reason they just would not put the air conditioning on they wanted to cook me alive they wanted boiled british man i don't know what this would mean is you couldn't kind of sit at your desk and just leave chocolate on your desk because it would melt it would melt throughout the day then one day i discovered this galbo it is a chocolate biscuit covered in a meltable chocolate well you can hold this in your fingers you can put a blowtorch to it and this [ __ ] won't melt now i'll admit i bought galbo more than probably anything else on this table with the exception of energy jelly and only now have i read the back and discovered how it's done apparently they just freeze dry it they put the chocolate on and then they freeze dry it and that makes the chocolate unmeltable so when the sun explodes and the world is consumed galbo will be left behind and uh pretty good black genius got a bit of a wild card option now um i've never had this before and i was i was torn on whether or not to put this in the video it's basically fried cheese with salami in a bag was it in the fridge nope it's just it was just on the shelf and that scent alarm bells ringing because the idea that something cheesy and meaty isn't in the fridge is a little bit concerning it'll probably come as no surprise to many of you that i do like baked cheese i'll do anything for baked cheese but even i have my limits let's do it it's got like a pizza style base under there here we go oh man oh i don't know who that's aimed at i don't know who would look at that and go yes dinner's solved because i'm the guy that likes baked cheese more than life itself but even i have my limits this is terrible um i do want another bite though for the road all right guys we're in the end game now and i've saved the best till last it is onigiri rice balls which you probably know all too well what isn't so beautiful which i don't know if i'm excited or terrified about is this this is spam on a ghiri i've never had it it says tuna mayonnaise here you can see there it's got the tuna mayonnaise filling the spam pork and the egg um i i think this is either going to be quite good or really bad and i don't know which but i hope it's good i mean luckily i've got these to look forward to got these in a minute and of course gaba for sleep but let's dive in i've seen this on the shelf now for so long and i've always wondered what it tastes like so here it is the moment of truth here we go uh initial impressions not very good there's rice everywhere it looks like a small bomb has gone off inside the span all right here we go one two three [Music] the thing with spam is it doesn't really have any flavor does it it's just like a thing a pink slightly chewy thing you know what it's not bad but it's certainly not good it's the bit we've all been waiting for the big one it's family mart chicken crisps potato chips there's even a little illustration on the back there showing you how to enjoy them and of course like family mart chicken it says right here on the front i am chicken i love the branding as well but the moment you open it you get that beautiful the smell of the chicken [Music] oh god yeah you can smell the sort of seasoning like pepper and different spices and [Music] all of a sudden i'm glad i made this video oh yeah oh god quite possibly the best flavored crisps i've had in my entire nine years in japan that's so good i'll give it like a 9.9 out of 10. i hope you've had some interesting ideas for things to try when you come to japan though obviously a lot of this stuff you can't get outside japan and right now would have been a great time to get a sponsorship deal with one of those snack box companies like i don't know what they're called but you know the ones but this video is not sponsored it's just me in a room isn't it so that was a missed opportunity bugger now before i eat these gaba for sleep and go into an induced coma i just want to say guys a huge thanks for being a part of abroad in japan all these years um you know it took nine years to get here to have a room like this to film somewhere like this in a room bigger than the size of a shoe the last few years have not been overly pleasant filming in my apartment i don't particularly enjoy it and that's why i haven't really filmed it much this year you know we've been out flying in cessna's or climbing mountains or riding a horse it's nice to come back inside and do these sort of videos and while i can't show you around the studio today in this video i will show you in the next few weeks when it's finished it's going to be very exciting i hope to surprise and amaze you with some of the stuff that's going to go on here in this room sounds a little bit sketchy but it's going to be good honestly i think this could be the start of something really cool and i just want to say a huge thanks for for making it this far and of course i can't wait to get natsuki up here and show him around and surprise him and amazing in the next few weeks but for now guys as always many thanks for watching be sure to check out the abroad japan patreon for more behind the scenes videos and i'll be back to do it all over again next time on the abroad japan channel for now gather for sleep let's do it so i'm going to eat these chocolates then i'm going to tidy up and in about 20 minutes or so i'll come back and tell you if they've had any effect i read online and apparently it's a bit like taking melatonin so it'd be interesting if it works oh it tastes pretty good though probably the best tasting chocolate i've had all evening i'll come back in about 20 minutes when i've tied it up a bit and i'll tell you how it feels [Music] just kidding it didn't really work i do feel kind of drowsy but i suspect that's less to do with gamma for sleep and more to do with the 400 things i've just eaten either way i've got to get going i've got a date tonight i just hope that she likes hamburgers chicken nuggets and potatoes otherwise it won't end well for her

Channel: Abroad in Japan

Views: 1,880,948

Keywords: japanese convenience store, japanese food, japanese snacks, japanese conbini, japanese drinks, japan seven eleven, abroad in japan, trash taste

Id: JpgXdQ0QXRA

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/flyinglikeadragon]

ngl i kinda loved the HCP bag that i recreated it on my redbubble for everyone to enjoy https://www.redbubble.com/i/tote-bag/HCP-by-tailspace/92234680.A9G4R

[u/shaoronmd]

gonna be honest, I was half expecting a Sea Dawg to pop in in the video

[u/Malodourous]

Kinda fatigued with convenience store food. Its nice but its really a teeny little part of Japan or even visiting Japan.

[u/alladessadagar]

Entertaining video as always, the background music was a bit distracting at times though