A Japanese Convenience Store Launched A Hot Cocoa-Soft Serve Hybrid And We Want It Very Badly

Today is a dark, weird day in a dark, weird year in a dark, weird timeline. But we at The Takeout actually have some really good news, and it involves warmed-up soft serve.

Here goes: Japanese convenience store Ministop heard humanity's wailing and gnashing of teeth and released two hot drinks that use soft serve as a base. It's ice cream. It's hot cocoa. It's combination ice cream-hot cocoa. And it's available across Japan, South Korea, the Phillipines, China, and Vietnam.

Japan Today reports that both drinks are made from a soft-serve base called "nomu soft serve" or drinkable soft serve. The first option is a bittersweet Belgian hot chocolate with a chocolate soft serve base, sugar-free whipped cream topping, and a generous dusting of cocoa. The second option is essentially the Belgian chocolate's white chocolate counterpart—its milky twin, if you will. It's called "Chou Milk," which translates roughly to Super Milk, and it contains a vanilla soft serve base and plenty of sugar-free whipped cream. Japan Today describes it as "softly sweet."

According to Japan Today, the drinks are part of Ministop's "Minisof" soft serve product line. This ain't your mother's soft serve: It's uniquely soft and fluffy thanks to a special aeration manufacturing method. I imagine that makes it especially ripe for sipping.

One more key tidbit: Ministop is also open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so if you're located near a store you can indulge at truly any hour. If you ask me, the sippable soft serve perfectly represents the high-end convenience store's mission: to "realize a society full of beaming smiles with 'deliciousness' and 'convenience.'" Now, if Ministop can just figure out how to mail some pleasantly warm soft serve to my Chicago apartment, I'll have a beaming smile, too.