Yamazaki’s beloved series branches out with a new fluffy taco offering.

At the risk of being figuratively flowery in multiple ways, walking down the bread aisle of a Japanese supermarket or convenience store is a little like strolling through a garden and seeing what sort of wonderful seasonal things are appearing. That’s especially true with Yamazaki Baking’s Lunch Pack series, Japan’s favorite brand of sandwich pockets. Sometimes Lunch Pack goes sweet, like with the sakura-flavor dessert ones we taste-tested during cherry blossom season, and sometimes they go savory, as with their Yokohama ramen version we enjoyed a little later in the spring.

And now we come to the newest Lunch Pack variety: taco sandwiches.

Even if you can’t read the Japanese text on the packaging, the inspiration this time is made clear by the Lunch Pack mascot characters, an enthusiastic boy and girl, who appear in new illustrations for each flavor. Aside from the massive size of the taco they’re holding up, you might also notice that it’s a particularly meaty version, with cheese, but no veggies. That’s not an oversight on the illustrator’s part, though, because the official name of this new Lunch Pack is “Lunch Pack Taco Meat.”

▼ タコスミート = taco meat

Other text on the package says “Chili meat filling and cheese cream, sandwiched together,” so it really is just the seasoned meat and cheese elements of a taco that Yamazaki is looking to give the Lunch Pack treatment to here, so that’s what we’ll be looking for in this taste test. Checking the ingredient list, we’ve got chili powder, tomato paste, consomme, cheese, grated garlic, cumin, and black pepper, so at the very least, it doesn’t look like these taco sandwiches are going to be bland.

Visually, the taco Lunch Pack looks like pretty much any other flavor from the outside, but that’s to be expected. Yamazaki typically doesn’t apply any visual flare like markings to the sandwiches themselves, and special colors are rare and usually reserved for sweet flavors with some sort of additional element like cocoa powder in the bread itself.

The taco Lunch Pack does set itself apart pre-tasting, though, by being an unusually pungent sandwich. Despite the filling being entirely enclosed by the bread, as soon as you open the plastic wrapper they come sealed in, you’re greeted by a scent of cheese and soft spiciness. It’s not a super powerful aroma, but you still probably wouldn’t want to eat these in a tightly enclosed space with other people around.

▼ Doesn’t look special, but it definitely smells unique.

Bite into one, and you’re greeted with the invitingly soft consistency of the Lunch Pack bread, which really speaks to Yamazaki’s baking expertise that they can produce something this high-quality on such a large scale and for such an affordable price (the taco Lunch Pack only cost me 127 yen [U.S.$0.80] at my local grocery store). As for the filling, “taco meat” really feels like the best way to describe it. Though the meat used here is ground pork, it’s not going to have any veteran taco enthusiasts thinking “Oh, wow, carnitas!” or bringing up memories of any other more specific flavor than the sort of thing you’d get at a fast food restaurant or snack bar where the menu lists the item as just a baseline, nondescript “taco.”

That’s not necessarily such a bad thing, though. Yamazaki wisely lets the meat and its associated seasonings be the main star of the flavor profile here, keeping the cheese element in the background as a supporting player, keeping the filling satisfyingly savory.

In terms of heat on the palate, there’s not much to be found. This is probably for the best, since simply pouring in a huge volume of hot sauce could have quickly turned this into a soggy, one-note mess that would pass through your digestive tract with destructive velocity. Really, the taco Lunch Pack is more about “spice” (as in savory seasonings) than “spiciness.”

Taking all this into consideration, the Taco Meat Lunch Pack probably isn’t really trying to be a substitute for authentic tacos, and it may or may not work as a stand-in for the tacos served at mass-market chains in the U.S. such as Del Taco or Taco Bell. In a way, it’s kind of like how some snack foods are “pizza-flavored” without tasting like actual pizza. You can see where the inspiration was, but the new flavor is sort of its own thing, and whether the remaining similarities to the original make it appealing or if the differences make it impossible to avoid unfavorably comparing the two is going to be a matter of individual preference.

Probably the biggest hurdle here is the texture. Both hard tacos and soft tacos have their fans, but since Lunch Pack uses neither a baked or fried tortilla, what you’ve got here is essentially a “fluffy taco,” which can confuse the brain as you bite through to the filling and reach flavors not normally associated with such pillowy outer layers.

Judged on its own merits, though, the Taco Meat Lunch Pack isn’t half-bad, and if you’re looking for something a little more creative than the regular peanut butter or ham-and-cheese fillings, it’s worth a shot.

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