Economical small portion of meatballs

Ishii no Meeto bouru

Brand: 7-11

Price: 118 yen

Place of purchase: 7-11 Convenience store

Rating:

If you follow my product reviews, you'll see that I often visit 7-11 convenience stores to add sides to my bento box lunches. Most of them are "cup deli" items in plastic containers. An alternative I've been eyeing is retort packages of similar "sozai", side dishes, in the chiller. This time I picked up Ishii's Meatballs in a 132-gram package. The bite-size meatballs are dressed with a tomato sauce. They're juicy and slightly sweet, thanks to the tomato sauce. They fit in your bento box compartments easily.

The meatballs, available in small retort packages at 7-11 convenience stores, are good as bento box filler in a pinch. The mild tomato sauce and juicy meat balls appeal to anybody, but especially to kids. And the price is right. A similar item in the "cup deli" section is double the price for roughly the same portion. I get it, consumers want fresh and additive-free foods. So I wondered if that meatball selection had mysterious things on the ingredient list. Nope. While it is a processed food, it appears that there are no weird preservatives or flavour enhancers. Nice.