Junk Food Nation, what day is it? No really. If you’re reading this blog post, please look for me underneath the Craps table at the Aria. Or is it the Cosmopolitan? I dunno; all I see is chandeliers and cigarettes. The Excalibur?

Anyways, hopefully you’ve been enjoying the games, and have been following my adventures on Instagram, Twitter @junkfoodguy, or Facebook. Be back Monday, a shell of my former self.

Today’s blog post is brought to you by my friend Rob L., who also tagged along at this past year’s Summer Fancy Food Show. Enjoy his experience with MunchPak! I reviewed MunchPak a little over a year ago, and at the time just broke down what the service was and surveyed the snacks I received. When MunchPak reached out to me for an updated review, I figured another take on their service might be nice. Rob stepped to the plate and went the extra mile, giving his take on virtually everything inside his MunchPak. He basically wrote a treatise, so I edited down the 20,000 word piece for you below. This ain’t the Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

So, without further ado – MUNCHPAK! By Rob. We’ll circle back after the post.

—–

“MunchPak sounds like a lobbying organization or a sex act. Maybe both.” This was my first thought as I signed for the package of (hopefully) delicious goodies at my cubicle. I set it aside until I could unbox the cache in private. Anyone who works in a cubicle environment knows that trotting out a box of snacks is like pricking one’s finger directly over a tank of crazed, starving sharks.

Readers might be wondering if I’m even fit to review this stuff. I think I have two very important qualifications: first, I work for a well-known newspaper, so I do real good with word. Second, this is what my desk drawer looks like:

And my inventory is getting low. Now, I don’t normally go for treats from afar – that is to say, my office’s vending machines are stocked with typical trans-fat- and sugar-saturated edibles, all proudly made in the U.S.A. So I was psyched to unbox the MunchPak, fully expecting to have my taste buds blown off by a slew of new flavors.

The box, once opened, reveals a card that suggests I “Enter to Win!” and “Take pictures and record videos of your unboxing experience!”

I’m worried that MunchPak is a bit too excited – this isn’t the Apple Watch. And besides, presumably all of the snacks are in their own individual packages, so I’m just playing a weird game of junk food matryoshkas.

Anyway, to make things more exciting, I tried grouping the snacks by their continent of origin:

I then attempted to lay them out in a way that suggested an actual map of their countries of origin. Reader, I am not clever enough for that. I am barely clever enough to get through child-resistant packaging. So instead I set about cataloging the box’s contents. Hopefully nothing in here is prune- or tamarind-flavored.

1. Something Japanese (Japan)

I don’t even know what to call this item. My girlfriend, whom I’ll cleverly anonymize as “my girlfriend,” took a look at the packaging and remarked, “this is worrisome.” The purple color of the snack itself made me think of prunes, and somehow I thought, well this is fine, I could use some regularity with my snack food. Alert Jamie Lee Curtis!

My girlfriend opened the packet and said, “smells like chocolate, looks like a butthole.” We are not in the business of making things appetizing for you, reader. But here’s the deal: these are good as hell. I’m writing this two weeks after trying them and I can still taste them. They’re like a dense, star-shaped rice puff, completely coated in a rich chocolate. Kind of like the world’s best cocoa puff – in fact, I’d happily pour some milk over these for breakfast. If I had any idea what these were called or what they’re even made from I’d buy them again, but unfortunately my Japanese is a little ???.

(JFG Note: Rob actually included some great Japanese characters to end that sentence in place of the “???”. I’m sure it makes sense. WordPress has no sense of humor, and apparently no way for me to publish Japanese script. Boo.)

 2. Ozmo Hoppo (Turkey)

“Ozmo Hoppo” brings to mind the great Devo song, “Jocko Homo” (or “Ape Man.”) To my knowledge, these are not produced with any ape or man parts. Instead what we have here is something that looks and tastes an awful lot like Kellogg’s Crave cereal, with some vaguely racist cartoon characters on the package and also stamped directly on the little chocolate-filled cookie squares.

I wish I could get more excited about these ozmo hoppo (ozmi hoppi?), but really, they taste almost exactly like you’d expect – a plain cookie shell, encapsulating a Nutella-ish filling. These could probably also be eaten with milk as cereal, but I’ll stick with the Japanese prune chocolate buttholes, thank you.

3. Herr’s Ketchup-flavored Potato Chips (U.S.A.) 

Reader, I am not a cynical, easily-disappointed guy, but these chips let me down. To begin with, they’re from the U.S., which means I can get them at Walmart. And the package I received is a blatant ripoff of Heinz’s Ketchup packaging. A little sleuthing uncovers other versions of this package that include the Heinz branding. Not sure what’s going on, but I’m thinking I got the scratch ‘n dent package, like those kids in sub-Saharan Africa who are wearing brand new “Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl XLIX Champions” t-shirts. But the proof is in the crunching, right?

The potato part of these chips is, well, appropriately potatoey. (Have fun with that one, Vice President Quayle! Also, sorry for confusing you, millennials!) The rest leaves something to be desired. They smell like ketchup, to be sure, but the flavor is more like barbecue, combined with a lot of powdery sleight-of-hand. I just couldn’t identify the ketchup flavor. All I tasted was the flavor of “overwhelming.”

Kind of like America itself.

4. Jolly Rancher Crayon Candy (Mexico)

I was sure this one would be tamarind-flavored. It wasn’t, but there was plenty of weirdness anyway. The product itself is a sticky, sludgy sugar goo, extruded like Play-Doh through a device that looks like a crayon with dwarfism.

This one was strawberry flavored. The goo itself is sickly sweet, but gritty, like the half-dissolved sugar at the bottom of an iced coffee, if the iced coffee were itself a strawberry daiquiri.

I ate the whole thing in about two minutes, because I am a disgusting pig, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was mostly the texture that threw me off, though the flavor was overpowering too. If you are a child you will love this like crack.

5. Milka (Germany)

I’m originally from New England, where “milka” simply describes an animal from whom a liquid is extracted when you pull on her teats. Fortunately, “milka” in German probably means “om nom nom nom.”

I had extremely high expectations for this candy bar and they were met. Seriously, this was amazingly tasty. Just like the Germans to take a normal Caramello and improve on it drastically. This is why BMW will always be more successful than Ford, folks – it’s the details.

What we have is the perfect ratio of milk chocolate to caramel. And the caramel itself hides a graham-cracker flavor within, a blend of creamy deliciousness. None of it feels unbalanced.

It took me about 30 seconds to open the package, and only slightly longer for my girlfriend and I to finish the whole thing. Sadly, I didn’t take more notes because I was busy cramming my maw with German goodness.

One thing I did note was that, in the ingredients list, there’s something called “invert sugar.” Which sounds like a mandate for diabetics.

6. Duplo (Poland) 

Duplos are safety Legos, right?

Ohh. Totally different kind of duplo.

Now that we’ve straightened that out, things don’t become any less confusing. I don’t know what “duplo” means in Polish, nor can I decipher these words on the package:

I’m wondering if it means “chocolate log,” because that’s what is inside. No, really, it looks like a piece of driftwood:

Another chocolate bar filled with something vaguely hazlenutty. My excitement meter is at a five-point-meh.

7. Kinder Happy Hippo (Germany/Austria)

Since we can’t have fun things in the U.S., like Kinder eggs, this will have to kind’er do for now. Yes, I am running out of bad jokes.

This confection looks less like a hippo and more like a dog turd. And trust me, with the massive snowmelt happening in NYC right now, I’ve seen and nearly stepped on every conceivable size, shape, and texture of feces.

None of them have sprinkles like this thing does, however. Point for Kinder. Still, it looks like a poop that fell into the sprinkle bin at Coldstone. Minus a few hundred points.

Good news: it tastes like something you’d actually want to eat. Typically biscuity, and again, filled with a chocolate crème. Similar to the Ozmo Hoppo, but the ratio of chocolate to cookie is skewed heavily in favor of the chocolate. I enjoyed that, but as my girlfriend opined, “there’s too much goo on the inside.”

All in all, not bad. But why the sprinkles? Apparently, you can’t polish a turd, but you can decorate it.

8. Antonelli Dora 3 Croissant (Italy)

Such high hopes for this. I love croissants, I’m Italian, my mother’s name was Antoinette…but I probably should’ve been tipped off by the name. Dora 3? What happened to Doras 1 and 2? Is this croissant filled with Soylent Dora?

This was awful. First, there was almost no cherry jam filling:

Though what was there was decently tasty. Not sickly sweet like you might find in a Hostess’ fruit pie (or its more awesome, lamentably-late cousin, Hubig’s), but more honest, like actual cherry, or that famous guy who once apocryphally chopped down a cherry tree.

The croissant itself looks and feels more like a calzone. No flaky texture, no buttery deliciousness coating my fingers. I made the mistake of having this for breakfast the other day. I wish I’d had a doughnut instead. Or gruel.

9. Boy Bawang (Philippines)

I probably could do an entire column just on the name Boy Bawang. Instead, let me introduce you to my 14 year-old self:

Glad I got that out of my system. Turns out that “Boy Bawang” means “Garlic Boy” and “cornick” just means corn nuts, and that’s a lucky thing because corn nuts were my first favorite snack food. Which now that I’ve typed it sounds utterly ridiculous.

No matter. One of my earliest memories is sitting in our family room, watching TV, eating corn nuts and wiping my hands on my ratty security blanket. The same blanket my parents would conveniently “lose” on a trip to D.C., thus setting in motion a chain of events that has brought us to this point, with short detours for law school and therapy.

Back to the Bawang. I really wanted to love these, for obvious reasons, but the barbecue flavor is a bit overwhelming. The crunch is magnificent; like what you’d find in an American corn nut, but much lighter. Nice corn flavor. I expect I’d love a plain version, if one exists.

It also bears mentioning that, of the 13 snacks MunchPak sent, only two – the Boy Bawang and the Herr’s Ketchup Chips – were savory. I love me some candy as much as the next guy with 14 fillings in his mouth (true!), but as any stoner will tell you, you gotta balance the sweet with some umami. The savory in this cornick comes from that old bugbear monosodium glutamate, as the ingredient list happily points out (just above “Iodized Salt”).

Let me try to sum up my MunchPak Munchsperience (© 2015) as briefly as possible:

A. oh, Dora 3, I fear you poisoned me

B. there weren’t many complete duds; there were few real standouts. (Whohoo, Japanese buttholes!)

C. I also think I’d have been more impressed if I didn’t live in a place where I have ready access to snacks like Pocky, sour straws, and Cow Tales.

So, MunchPak. Great concept, great idea for novice junk foodies, decent variety of snacks, now please excuse me while I wash the MSG out of my mouth.

—-

Big thank you to Rob for helping me out with this post, and you can always follow him on Twitter @robxlii. Thanks again, MunchPak, for giving us a chance to try your product!

PURCHASED AT: MUNCHPAK.com

COST: They run anywhere from $10 to $40

Thoughts? Please comment below or hit me up on Twitter @junkfoodguy or LIKE my Facebook Page and message me there. I also have Google+!! Let’s hang out.

Sincerely,

Junk Food Guy