Authentic Japanese snacks delivered to your door!  Snakku is a subscription service starting at $38.95. 
(Read more to get 10% off!)

They kindly sent me a sample to try out and so I could share my experience with you. I must say - lots of childhood memories came back to me when opening their box. Good childhood memories of course :) 

Wrapping
I believe that all Japanese products begins its high quality experience at the wrapping/packaging stage. Snakku uses a beautiful Japanese cloth, also called a furoshiki to wrap the Snakku box. This month it was a deep green furoshiki - resusable of course! I plan to wrap my lunches or any other boxes with this in the future.

Branding and Messaging
Inside the box, I found a pamphlet and flyer of Snakku's. I love how they use Japanese characters (which are truly Japanese, not random characters!) to make the experience authentic, even for a native Japanese person like me.

The Snacks
This month (August) happened to be the month of rusks! I hadn't had rusks since I left Japan (~7 years ago) so this was a *very* pleasant surprise. Here is the list of snacks which came in my box (taken from Snakku's website):

• 17 regionally made Japanese rusks of different flavors (My favourite was the *Classic*, simply butter & sugar)

• Yuki no Yado: Slightly salty senbei topped with Hokkaido fresh cream (Now this has my childhood written all over it!)
• Summer Salty Pocky: Milk chocolate covered pocky with sea salt and sugar crystals (Who doesn't like Pocky?)
• Maison De Kukkia: Matcha chocolate sandwiched between wafer cookies  (Classy & sophisticated)
• Bourbon Rumando: Grilled crepe cookie dipped in cocoa cream 
• Hokkaido Match Milk Candy: Made from Hokkaido milk and matcha from Aichi
  
  

All of these high quality Japanese snacks were all very tasty - and now you can get 10% off by using "jpinsider" at checkout. Now's your time to give Snakku a try ;) 

While catching up on my Japanese TV episodes, I ran into 1 which concentrated on Japan's tomato industry. Japanese tomatoes (and vegetables in general) are very high in quality where ever you go. The colour, shape, shine and taste turns out to be perfect even without "picking" at the supermarket. How do they do this? This TV program asked Italian tomato experts to discover the "How" and here's what they found:

1. 24 kinds : While countries like Italy have 3 different types of tomatoes to sell commercially (small, medium and large), Japan has 24 different kinds. As seen above, first they categorize the tomato in size (6 sizes), then rank (A-D). 
2. How do they categorize this?:  Manually & by machine. After the tomatoes are sorted by size,  factory workers visually check the tomato's head (with the leaf) and rank it from A-D. This is done by the factory workers carefully controlling 4 different buttons on a super fast conveyor belt (it takes them ~3 seconds per tomato). These workers are super trained.

1. After the factory workers:  They use machines and check the bottom of the tomato and categorize it by rank (A-D). If the top was an "A", and the bottom was a "D", the tomato will end up being ranked "D".
2. Finally...: The tomatoes are taken to check the "sweetness" through a machine. This of course determines the final decision of the tomato's rank.

Super detail oriented  - right?
But this careful Japanese detail results in great customer experience throughout the country. Customers know that they can trust Japanese tomatoes. I must say that this high expectation from customers can result in spoiled customers and in extreme negative comments if the products are not up to par, but this helps in a healthy competition! This may be why Japanese products are so high in quality. Passion coming from suppliers and trust coming from consumers..

More "Japanese quality" series comin' up! Let me know if you have a specific product/service you would like to learn more about in terms of quality.