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This story is part of Junk Food, Redefined, our new collection of snack recommendations, recipes, and perspectives that celebrate an undervalued food group. Read all the stories here.
My favorite food group is snacks, and I don’t discriminate. Savory snacks and sweet ones, healthy snacks and nutritionally bankrupt garbage—as long as your mom would disapprovingly tut, “That’s not a meal,” I’m interested. And subscription snack boxes keep my munchies at bay without my having to forage for the most obscene flavor of Combos at my local bodega or raid the BA test kitchen for pecan nubs left over from muffin recipe testing. Thanks to highly paid consumer analysts, there are options for everyone, from insatiable fans of international snacks to vegans on high-protein diets (good luck, friends!) at prices ranging from $40 to $60 a month. I selflessly tested five of them to bring you reviews of the good (sriracha cashews), the bad (keto lemon truffle bars), and the jiggly (cherry blossom jelly). On to the snacks!
For the Japanophile: Bokksu
I’ve raved about Bokksu before, and it remains my pick for the best subscription snack box. Each shipment is loaded with 20 to 24 different Japanese snacks, from sour gummies made with Yamanashi Prefecture white peaches to sweet potato langue de chat cookies from a boutique bakery in Tokyo. The contents of each curated box are grouped loosely around a theme, like “winter in Hokkaido” or “tour of Japan.” My most recent shipment, a tribute to sakura season, contained a sack of wobbly pink jelly in which cherry blossoms pickled with ume plum vinegar were suspended. Looked like an expensive spa product, tasted like a delicately floral Jell-O Jiggler. Subscriptions are priced from $40 to $50 a month, depending on the duration of your plan.
For the Fancy Pants: Mouth
This online marketplace specializes in small-batch goodies like artisan jams and grass-fed beef jerky. Order à la carte if you will, but I’m here for the monthly subscription. In my first box I received five full-size snacks—bags of popcorn, pretzel nuggets, and chocolate cookies that were comparable in size to what you might buy at the grocery store, as well as two more petite pouches of granola and pistachios (high-value snack alert!). You pay for the quantity, however; at $54 to $60 a month, Mouth’s subscription service was the most expensive of the ones I tested. As for the quality of the goods, the crumbly house brand chocolate sables were a little on the dry side (although I appreciate that the ingredient list includes only items you’d find in a home kitchen), but Roni-Sue’s beer caramel pretzel nuggets, studded with candied mustard seeds, are a new snack-time favorite.
For the Carb Counter: KetoKrate
I personally am not living that low-carb-high-fat life, but if I were, I imagine the majority of my brain space would be devoted to figuring out what I could actually eat. So while the keto-friendly snacks in this $40 monthly box were not my favorites, I think this is probably a lifesaver of a delivery service for those on a specialized diet. My box contained 11 individual snacks, and the hits for me were the items that were inherently low-carb, like salt and pepper pork rinds. But the majority of the products were gluten-free sweet treats that had swapped sugar for erythritol and wheat flour for almond flour. I wouldn’t eat them unless I had to—and I don’t, so moving on!
For the Socially Conscious Snacker: The Goods Mart
One look at The Goods Mart’s homepage—the sans serif font, the brightly colored ticker tape banner—and you get a pretty clear idea of the types of trendy, Instagram-friendly food brands that are in store. In its marketplace The Goods Mart curates a variety of delicious snacks, sauces, and beverages that can be sorted by founder identity (AAPI, Black, Latinx, female, or BIPOC) or other criteria (gluten-free, paleo, organic, vegan, sustainable). The subscription snack boxes follow a similar model; the $48 “Founded” box features five to seven items from minority-owned companies. My Black History Month box contained an exceedingly delicious Ghanaian chocolate bar from Kanda and a bottle of Berry Bissap, a ruby red, gently spiced West African hibiscus drink that I incorporated into my morning smoothies.
For the Subscription Skeptic: NatureBox
A subscription snack box pioneer, NatureBox has pivoted to a slightly different approach, relying on a membership model that provides discounts on its house-brand snacks and doesn’t lock you into a subscription plan. All the products they sell are free of corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and they offer a wide selection of non-GMO, sugar-free, and vegan snacks. But we are here for the Sriracha cashews. To be clear, other items are good: For those with a sweet tooth, the dried pineapple is basically candy, somehow without added sugar, and show me a person who would kick these puffy pepper jack cheese bites out of bed. But the crunchy-spicy-sweet Sriracha cashews are worth the $36 annual membership fee alone.
