Royal Family Food's Coffee Mochi

Attempting to open a bag of chips is simple enough. Just tear open the bag, reach your hand in, and go. Maybe that's why they are so bad for you, I wonder. What if eating every bite took effort, with each chip individually wrapped for freshness. Surely, the extra effort, and calories burned, would make mowing down on a bag of Lays a more healthful, fresher experience. Best of all you wouldn't have to eat the entire bag, since every last chip would be perfectly fresh, every time.

My application to work for FritoLay wasn't just rejected: when he was done reading my ideas the head of HR set my resume on fire. But Japan agrees with me. Oh no, not one company, the entire island. The Japanese obsessively wrap their snacks, plastic inside plastic, all destined to bulk up landfills and continental shelves.

Mochi is itself one of Japan's more intriguing snacks. It's a ball or so of crushed rice paste filled with different flavors of jelly, typically red bean, and then wrapped with various leaves, depending on time of year and flavor.

Royal Family Food's bite-sized Coffee Mochi is stuffed with a brownish coffee filling that's not quite as tasty as the typical red bean paste, and makes the entire snack muddy, and the coffee flavor itself is so mild that one hardly tastes anything except the sweetened rice. Not that that's a bad thing. I think I'll just have one more.

And another.