米乖乖: The Little Rice Puff that Could
limited edition flavors of a favorite Taiwanese snack
This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.
Today, I have the pleasure of letting you know that we now sell Kuai Kuai on our website—one of the most nostalgic Taiwanese snacks of all. And not just any Kuai Kuai, but three limited edition flavors made with farmers’ associations and producers across Taiwan, featuring Hualien seaweed, Taitung mango, and roasted sweet potato.
I’ve written about the folkloric, tech-lord status of this puffed grain snack in the past. This time around, I appreciate the local-first approach Kuai Kuai has taken to developing new flavors, even creating a grouper-based seasoning when that fish was punitively banned from trade by China.
We are selling these by the bag and by the case. A quick note to let you know that the cases are much more cost effective (for you and us), so we recommend you buy in bulk or share cases with friends.
When we opened our Taiwanese gamadiam (translation: general store) in 2022, there were a few things we couldn’t live without: terrazzo floors, calligraphic cloth signs, bamboo baskets, and our favorite childhood snack, Kuai Kuai.
This puffed rice (or corn) snack is one of those icons that, like a Tatung rice cooker, seems to exude Taiwanese sensibility. The ambiguous pirate figure on the bag has all the enthusiasm of the best of Taiwanese mascot culture, but also channels Koxinga, a Chinese-Japanese pirate that liberated Taiwan from Dutch colonists “back in the day.”
The snacks themselves have the texture of a cheese puff, but represent Taiwanese flavors like coconut and five spice. The first leans sweet and the second savory. My kids love them, and for a short, but blissful period, mistakenly called Cheetos Kuai Kuai, making me feel like a good Taiwanese mom.
In spite of their cult following, Kuai Kuai are notoriously hard to find stateside, at least on the East Coast. Distributors here seem to stock them erratically. For the shop opening, we found a stash in New Jersey, drove over to pick it up, and couldn’t get any more for months.
As of today, we’re buying directly from Taiwan. This pirate baby is riding over on our own ships now, to supply all the school lunches, airplane trips, summer picnics, and movie nights you can dream of. Well, while supplies last anyway. Let’s see how we go.
Kuai Kuai, Protector of All Things Taiwanese
A few years ago, we wrote about the special place this snack holds in Taiwanese folk tradition. The green color of the bag, the auspicious name (which translates to obedient), and optimistic messaging have been widely credited for keeping “ghosts” away from “technology”—a wonderful and curious coming together of Taiwan’s folk mysticism and high tech industry. It’s a special brand of humility that the world’s most talented electrical engineers and computer scientists would attribute their success to a swashbuckler on a green bag. Classic Taiwanese deflection of praise.
This year, Kuai Kuai released a limited edition snack on the occasion of Computex 2025, Taiwan’s big computing expo and one of the largest in the world.
I love how this design, meant to commemorate the coming of the great AI era at one of the world’s biggest tech trade shows, smacks of shareware diskettes from the 1990s. It’s giving Duke Nukem.
But beyond their tech talisman fame, Kuai Kuai has another side that’s even more Taiwanese. They love to collaborate with farmers’ associations, supermarkets, local brands, and food purveyors across the island to launch limited edition flavors that highlight local Taiwanese produce, culture, and cuisine.
For example, in 2022, when China banned Taiwanese grouper imports, Kuai Kuai produced a grouper flavor in an effort to reduce the financial harm befalling the industry. (We did the same with banned pineapples in 2021, creating our dried fruit brand as a new business channel for Taiwanese farmers to diversify their customer base.) They’re not just protecting tech, they’re championing Taiwanese culture overall.
Yun Hai Kuai Kuai Collection
In towns and counties throughout Taiwan, the local farmers’ associations run retail shops featuring local produce, dried goods, and agricultural products. I was in Taitung in February, searching for the Sign of the Kuai and was delighted to see a special section dedicated to Taitung flavors. They had gac fruit and honeydew; custard apple (cherimoya); Taitung mango; and roselle (or hibiscus).
I bought them all, and picked up even more collaborative flavors on my travels throughout the island, from different regions and farm stores. When I got back, the Yun Hai team selected our three favorites to bring to you, featuring seaweed from Hualien, sweet potato from Tainan, and mango from Taitung. Due to the limited nature of these collaborations, we will restock these for as long as they're popular and available. We can probably get mango and seaweed again, but sweet potato is less likely.
Read on to learn more about them, where the ingredients for these flavors are sourced from, and their culinary significance.
Xiaxue Mango 夏雪芒果
In collaboration with the Taitung County Farmers' Association, this flavor pairs Taitung's most fragrant rice with its sweetest mangoes—a combination that conjures mango sticky rice.
The rice for the Kuai Kuai puff comes from the rural township of Beinan 卑南, known for its short-grain rice with al dente “Q" texture and nutty fragrance. The aroma complements the deep sweetness of xiaxue 夏雪 (summer snow) mangoes, a golden-colored Taiwanese variety that has the sweet intensity and electric zing of tu 土 mangoes (the same kind used in our dried green mangoes), but with more flesh and a smaller seed.
Taiwan has over 50 kinds of mangoes. We’ve got three represented in our catalog (tu dried green mangoes, Irwin dried mangoes and jam, and now xiaxue Kuai Kuai), but here’s a fun guide to other common types, useful for your next visit.
Roasted Sweet Potato 烤地瓜
This flavor is made with Taiwanese sweet potato, roasted until caramelized and custardy sweet on the inside. It somehow tastes like the best cereal ever.
As a special collaboration with K.K. Orchard 瓜瓜園, Taiwan's largest sweet potato farming company, this Kuai Kuai is made from Tainong No. 57 sweet potatoes, known for their rich, fluffy, and chewy yellow interior. Their sweet chestnut aroma rounds out the brown rice fragrance of the Kuai Kuai.
If you have any lingering doubts about the love that the Taiwanese have for roasted sweet potato, here’s a short video of the kind of queue this tuber can pull.
Double Seaweed 海藻
This double seaweed flavor is made using two kinds of seaweed: sea cabbage (aka green laver) and sea lettuce, both cultivated from the Pacific waters off the coast of Hualien.
The result is savory, marine, and a little bit sweet. Fish powder and peanut butter contribute a nutty seafood flavor that reminds us of the best shrimp chip.
Taiwanese seaweed snacks are some of my favorites, often mixing the salty with the sweet. If you’re an algae fan, I’d also recommend this almond seaweed brittle in the shop, made with maltose for a snappy texture.
And if you find yourself in Taiwan, keep an eye out for the variety of fresh, often seasonal, seaweed dishes prepared using natively found species—like cold hijiki salad, stir-fried Sarcodia suae (蘇氏海木耳), and Gelidium (石花菜) agar jelly desserts.
Before I Go
If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss the most recent episode of Cooking With Steam, in which I make a very typically Taiwanese bowl of Cabbage Rice and Pork Rib Soup in the middle of what could only be called a typhoon.
I (and my dad, see below) are absolutely loving this savory-spicy Hakka-style Kumquat Sauce, the perfect pairing with cold poached chicken, a favorite Taiwanese summer dish. You can try it out while it’s on sale for 10% off.
From dad, #notsponsored:
Thanks so much to the Taiwanese American Conference West Coast for inviting Lillian and I to speak at their gathering last week. The audience was mostly comprised of elder Taiwanese activists, and I learned a lot from hearing about their struggles to stand up for Taiwan and their people. They shared a video of this group protesting in their prime, standing for Taiwan in 1975, on the day President Ford traveled to China to begin the reversal of the US cross-strait stance.
There’s nothing like a bonafide Taiwanese Certificate of Appreciation. Photo: TAC-WC.
Back to Shrapnel City,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉
Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, and Lillian Lin. Photos and typos by me unless otherwise credited. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.
乖乖: The Obedient Corn Puff That Keeps Taiwan's Technology in Good Working Order
All about Kuai Kuai culture.
Cooking with Steam Episode 03: Cabbage Rice and Pork Rib Soup
Cooking With Steam 好蒸氣 is a cooking show about Taiwanese food. It’s part of Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai.
These are good,really good! I'm chomping on the mango right now.