As a child growing up on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, Jaron Hanus, 36, a co-owner of the Japanese-inspired cafe Neko Koneko in Honolulu, drank milk with every meal at the insistence of his grandmother. To make it more enticing, she would buy the strawberry-flavored kind from a local Japanese grocery store or make her own by simmering fresh strawberries in milk and honey. Hanus’s wife and business partner, Erin Yonamine, 45, also grew up on Oahu and remembers her grandmother plying her with ichigo (the Japanese word for strawberry) milk and ichigo milk candies from Shirokiya, an erstwhile Japanese department store in Honolulu. When the couple opened Neko Koneko in 2021, they created their own version of their childhood drink — updated with oat milk but just as vibrantly pink.

With the rise of industrial milk production in the mid-20th century, single-serve cartons became a fixture of school lunch trays throughout the United States, but also in countries including France, Korea and Japan. Flavored milks soon followed. Nesquik introduced strawberry powder for milk around 1960, and the Korean company Binggrae added strawberry milk to its lineup soon after the debut of its banana flavor in 1974. While chocolate milk still dominates the flavored milk market in the U.S., the margin may be narrowing. Lately, TikTokers have been swirling ruby streaks of fresh strawberry purée into milk, emulating a drink found in Korean cafes (including the country’s Starbucks coffeehouses). And last year, to commemorate the 12th anniversary of Dominique Ansel Bakery’s first location in Manhattan’s SoHo, the pastry shop, which had previously released a strawberry milk-flavored version of its famous Cronut, collaborated with the Brooklyn fragrance company Joya Studio to produce a strawberry milk birthday candle.

ImageAn ichigo (strawberry) spoon accompanies the strawberry milk recipe from Just One Cookbook.Credit...Courtesy of justonecookbook.com

“It’s a classic flavor combination that never goes out of style in Japan,” says Namiko Hirasawa Chen, 47, the Yokohama-born author of Just One Cookbook, a Japanese recipe blog. “It’s a solid part of Japanese food culture.” In the 1960s, when greenhouse cultivation spurred the production of strawberries, the main varieties grown were sour, so people mashed them with milk and sugar. Chen recalls ichigo-milk-flavored candy — particularly the Sakuma Seika sweets introduced in the 1970s, with strawberry hard candy encasing crispy and creamy mille-feuille — as well as special spoons, flat-bottomed and dimpled, like the berry, used to crush strawberries before pouring milk over them. “Even now, with Japan’s supersweet domestic strawberries, people still enjoy strawberry milk,” Chen says.

Honolulu’s strong ties to Japan — a quarter of its population is of Japanese descent — mean strawberry milk is almost as common a flavor there as matcha (and often combined with it) at cafes and sweet shops. It’s the most popular flavor at the pop-up shave ice shop Chillest Shave Ice, where seeds speckle the strawberry-milk-drenched heap of ice. “The flavor profile to me is very Japanese,” says owner Aaron Wong. At Daily Whisk Matcha, a Honolulu cafe, the strawberry milk was originally introduced as a seasonal drink. “We wanted something fun for the summer,” says owner and clothing designer Summer Shiigi, 38, but it became so popular that it’s now part of the permanent menu. She says families often come in together, the adults ordering the strawberry matcha latte, the children the strawberry milk on its own. “There’s an added level of warmheartedness there.”

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