Dramallama’s BeanieBox Review: Office Edition

by dramallama

Thank you, everyone, for supporting our first official BeanieBox last month. We asked @dramallama to review our October BeanieBox. If you missed the launch, you can still subscribe to our monthly Korean snackbox here.
– DB Staff

 
DRAMALLAMA’S BEANIEBOX REVIEW

Nothing makes me happier than food, so the addition of BeanieBox to Dramabeans made my guilty pleasure dreams come true. Watching dramas, writing about dramas, AND a convenient monthly subscription box with food? Dramabeans has spoiled me rotten.

I rarely treat myself to real snacks — the salty, crispy, sweet, crunchy kinds — and have trained myself to only buy healthy snacks because I can unconsciously eat an entire bag of anything. But life is about balance, and BeanieBox gave me an opportunity to indulge myself this month. I traded in my almonds and dried fruit for some real snacks, including a few that I remember from my childhood. The giddy feeling of opening a box full of mystery snacks filled me with nostalgia — that pure excitement after you convinced your parents to buy you snacks from the Korean grocery store and can’t wait to dig up your favorite one from the load of groceries.

To fortify my self-control and to share the happiness of snacks, I brought my box to the office and distributed them to my co-workers. Among other things (like gossip, coffee runs, office politics, and everything I learned from Misaeng), snacks are essential to office life and morale. I was thrilled to share a bit of culture with my colleagues through the joys of Korean snacks. In exchange for a snack, I requested my office mates for their brief review. Here’s are the roughly quoted reviews of the snacks:

Goraebap is one of those childhood favorites that I remember even my parents enjoying. My colleague described them as “good balance of sweet and savory,” and the lightness of the crackers made them seem guilt-free. Plus, they come in cute sea creature figures! They’re dangerously binge-able, but luckily, these snacks came in smaller packs.

Pusshuo Pusshuo is another beloved childhood snack, and it was quickly recognized by my coworkers who had grown up in or had visited Asia. A coworker who had grown up in Indonesia immediately connected this snack to her own childhood memories of crushing up Indomie with her friends. When she moved to the States, this unfamiliar concept of crushing up raw instant noodles as a snack was not received well by her American peers. Seeing the manifestation of this snack gave her validation that crushed-up Indomie was a very normal snack.

Not everything was a hit. The Sun garlic bread flavored chips were not very garlicky and “tasted like Rama butter” and the Maxim instant coffee seemed random. To me, the minor shortcomings were compensated by the excellent packaging. The box itself was well-designed, the catalog was fun and functional, and the snacks themselves were well-packaged. The simple barley crisps (positively reviewed as “a hint of sweet to a airy puff of barley”) had cute packaging, emphasizing their roundness and including a fun little character to the label. The small jelly pudding were decorated with familiar Kakao emoticons, which made them much cuter than your average jello.

I’d consider this box a win in my book — full of crowd-pleasers, new and old — and I would gladly sign up for another joyful month of snacking. I’m curious to see what the other boxes will present, and I have full faith in this community to become snack experts in the coming months.

 
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