I love exploring the snacks and drinks scene when I’m abroad. A trip to a convenience store is never dull when in another country and especially more so when in this part of the world: Southeast Asia. The convenience stores here are known to be special, especially 7-11s. In Indonesia, however, 7-11s stopped operating quite a few years ago due to stiff competition from local giants Alfa Mart and Indomaret and a ban on alcohol sales in the country. The latter reason ultimately led to them closing down all of their stores. Nonetheless, the local stores are absolutely everywhere and I mean everywhere. Wherever you find yourself in the city, these stores will not be too far away. Let’s dive into what we tried.
Drinks
Let’s start with the local drinks. Ice teas are very popular in the country with them often being the drink of choice when eating out, so it is no surprise that there are a lot of bottled ice teas to choose from. Leading brand, Sosro, does quite possible the most famous and popular of them all: Teh Botol. This is bottled jasmine tea best consumed cold. They also happen to do fruit teas (another Indonesian favourite) with intriguing flavours like apple, blackberry and lychee. The Teh Botol was a little underwhelming in my opinion. I love bottled cold jasmine tea and so I felt a little let down by this one. It just lacked that sweetness that I love. The fruit teas though, were very good. We only tried the apple one and were very impressed.
We also tried this rhino drink that seemed to stand out in the fridge and caught our eye. After doing a little bit of research it seems it’s actually a medicinal drink and probably shouldn’t be drunk excessively. It was decent, nothing special.
Moving now onto foreign drinks found in Jakarta. We have to start with strawberry Fanta. We saw this absolutely everywhere. Both in Jakarta and outside. In fact, it was more common than the standard orange one. How did it taste? Very similar to strawberry Mirinda from the UK, but just a little less sweet. I loved it, the wife didn’t. Another notable find were the different flavoured Milkis. Milkis is a Korean drink that combines milk with fizz (soda). May sound strange, but we love it. Here in Jakarta I noticed a couple of other flavours: strawberry and melon. I tried the melon one because I love melon flavoured drinks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as good as the original one.
Snacks
We tried a few things that would come under snacks, but honestly felt a little underwhelmed. We didn’t really enjoy the taste of most of the things we tried with the exception of the pandan flavoured pillows, potato bread and banana cheese cake (Japanese style). The pandan flavoured pillows were actually so good as you can probably imagine. They can be consumed just as a snack or I can imagine them actually going well with a bowl of cold milk like a cereal. The potato bread was filled with some interesting ingredients and it actually was from a famous bakery called Holland Bakery and not a convenience store.
The salted egg crisps and yuzu flavoured pocky caught our eye and we were very interested to see how they tasted. Unfortunately, both were a let down and we definitely wouldn’t recommend. We saw the silver queen chocolate everywhere; it is an Indonesian chocolate brand. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that great.
Fruit
When you’re in this part of the world you have to sample some of the exotic fruits. We’ll talk about 3 that we tried. Salak, yellow watermelon and sweet pineapple. Salak is also known as snakeskin fruit because of the exterior. It tastes almost like a mixture of a jackfruit, apple and banana. It’s a funny one because most who try it end up defining it different. Yellow watermelon is basically just watermelon but in yellow colour. Cool though! And sweet pineapple is also basically just a pineapple, but with a less prominent pineapple taste.
