With summer over and chillier weather creeping in, ice cream’s out as consumers seek warmer offerings to wrap their hands around. Well, Japan’s outlier convenience store MINI STOP has different ideas in mind, having recently released two hot drinks that use soft serve as a base!

Belgian Hot Chocolate and Hot Milk Soft Cream hot drinks

Starting October 19th, 2020, MINI STOP released Belgian chocolate and Vanilla milk drinks made from a soft-serve base called “nomu soft serve” which means drinkable soft-serve in Japanese. The drinks are also topped with even more cream of the whipped variety.

The Belgian hot chocolate drink is bittersweet and uses MINI STOP’s chocolate soft-serve as the base. The whipped cream topping is sugar free and comes dusted with cocoa. You can enjoy this decadent dairy drink for ¥490, tax included.

The Belgian hot chcolate’s Snow White twin is a white hot chocolate, called the “Chou Milk” in Japanese which translates roughly to Super Milk. This drink, which uses MINI STOP’s vanilla soft serve as a base and is topped with sugar free whipped cream, is full bodied and softly sweet. The white hot chocolate is also priced at ¥490, tax included.

MINI STOP’s ‘Minisof’

The drinks are part of MINI STOP’s “Minisof” business which the convenience store launched in March, 2020. “Minisof” is soft serve ice cream that is made from carefully selected ingredients including milk and condensed milk from Hokkaido. The rich ice cream is uniquely soft and fluffy thanks to being manufactured using a special aeration method.

The innovation never stops at MINI STOP however as shown by the dairy scientists latest creation: ‘nomu soft serve’. We assume this stroke of ingenious simplicity took a little more inspiration than the laymen’s error of forgetting to put the soft serve back in the freezer.

For ice-cream lovers that want to sample their favorite dessert as a melty medlley of cream and chocolate, we recommend MINI STOP’s latest innovation as your winter beverage of choice in 2020.