Kikkoman Soymilk Seasonal Flavors

 Surprising maron and yomogi mochi edition

First off, I don't buy these often anymore even though I love them. I love 'juice boxes' and don't drink milk, so the flavored soy milk is fun. I still don't understand why Japanese drink milk as much as they do, knowing that lots of them are likely lactose intolerant. There are tons of options for cafe latte in any supermarket or convenience store, plus strawberry and banana milk, but this brand (and sometimes a generic version) is about it for soy options usually. My husband said it's because it's not so popular to drink soymilk for Japanese. I await the day there's a good soy cafe latte sold in every store and think it will sell well here too.

The main reasons I don't buy these often is cost (as much as 100 yen each for 200 ml), single serving packaging waste, and availability. In my neighborhood, the flavors I love (black sesame and green tea) are not sold and neither are seasonal flavors. So what's the fun.

When I go to another supermarket sometimes I check. I finally saw the coconut flavor at our local Red Cabbage, and last time found these strange flavors too. I think I've seen the maron before but not the yomogi mochi. I like the wagashi so thought it was worth a try, even if it is a weird choice.

It was surprisingly strong on the yomogi (mugwort) flavor. Usually these are mostly sweet soymilk and not strong on flavor, but this one isn't super sweet – only sweetened with powdered an or sweet red beans. The yomogi was borderline medicinally strong, which I kind of liked, although I don't think I'd get this again. I only recommend this one if you Really Like yomogi.

As far as the maron flavor goes, I wasn't expecting it to be strong either, because I don't think the flavor of chestnut is normally strong. It shows a mont blanc on the packaging, so I thought it would be mostly sweet. In fact, the Japanese says, “surprising mont blanc style” on it, and I giggled about that. My husband and I didn't find the flavor surprising at all and it was as expected, a sort of sweet and mild chestnut flavor.