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Remember when you were a kid, and your mom would check for monsters under your bed, put band-aids on your scraped knees and elbows, and cut the crusts off your sandwiches? Wouldn’t it be great if someone would still do that for you?

No matter how much you offer them for the service, the employees of Japanese bread and snack producer Yamazaki Bread won’t come to your house and protect you from the Boogey Man, because seriously, have you seen the guy? Way too scary. They do have your bread needs covered though, with their popular series of crust-free Lunch Pack sandwiches.

But despite the lack of crust being a major selling point for Lunch Pack, people in Japan aren’t complaining when one with a bit of brown on the edge slips through, because fans say it’s a sign of good luck.

Ordinary Lunch Packs are made by removing the crusts from two pieces of bread, inserting a layer of filling between them, and fusing the two halves together. Aside from regular offerings like egg, peanut butter, and jam (although oddly peanut butter and jelly aren’t available in the same sandwich), Yamazaki Bread also offers a variety of seasonal fillings such as sweet bean paste, whipped cream, and beef patties flavored with red wine. The product has a cult following in Japan, and being made from just the soft, fluffy centers of the slices of bread makes it especially popular with people who hate crusts on their sandwiches (along with, we’re guessing, having to clean their rooms and share their toys).

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On rare occasions though, a Lunch Pack with some crust still on its edge makes its way through Yamazaki Bread’s quality control and gets shipped to a retailer. No one has any statistics on how often this happens, so your odds of finding one could be one in ten thousand or one in a hundred thousand. What we do know is that the crusted Lunch Pack is a rare sight, and legend holds that if you find one, it’s a sign that good things are waiting for you in the near future.

As part of our research we talked one Mr. Suzuki, a 27-year-old Lunch Pack fan. “People have been talking about how the crusted ones are good luck since I was in high school, so I always kept an eye out,” He told us. “Even by the time I graduated from college, I hadn’t found one, but after I started working I stumbled across one shopping at the convenience store, and it made my day.”

From Yamazaki Bread’s perspective, the crusted Lunch Packs are probably considered defects that they’d rather not find their way into consumers’ hands. For Lunch Pack fans, however, the manufacturer’s efforts to stamp them out just adds to their rarity and the excitement of finding one. And while they may technically be defective, the sandwiches taste just fine even with the crust (huh, so our moms were right about that, too).

Here at RocketNews24, we lack both the proper equipment and sufficient intestinal fortitude to go out and hunt for mythical creatures like Bigfoot or the Chupacabra. Bread crusts fall right into our comfort zone though, so we dispatched our team of reporters to scour Tokyo’s convenience and grocery stores. Rumor holds that even a scrap of crust nets you the full benefits of the lucky Lunch Pack, but in the end our search failed to turn up even one specimen. But while we finished our search empty handed, photographic evidence of the existence of the crusted Lunch Pack has been offered by other fans on the Internet.

Some of you might be wondering what Yamazaki Bread does with the crusts removed from Lunch Packs. They’re actually repurposed as part of the company’s Choi Paku (Bite-Sized) Rusk product line of snacks. No word on whether or not scraps of soft fluffy bread ever show up in bags of Choi Paku Rusk, but as the polar opposite of the crusted Lunch Pack, we can only assume it would be an ill omen on par with 13 black cats running under a ladder, so if you find one, watch out.

Related: Livedoor
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