🍱Bento Box Emoji
Generally, the 🍱 emoji just means “bento box. ” It’s used to represent the food itself or the idea of a Japanese-style lunch.
The 🍱 emoji represents a bento box.
- Unicode
- U+1F371
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :bento:
- Skin tones
- No
What does the 🍱 Bento Box emoji mean?
People search for this character under a lot of different names, and the ones we have collected number 3.
Bento Box emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
Vendors keep repainting this one. Counting the archived versions further down, the bento box has been drawn in 4 ways.
iPhone, iPad, macOS
Android, Gmail, Chrome
X, Discord, Twemoji apps
Facebook, Messenger
Open-source, design systems
Galaxy, One UI
Windows, Teams, Fluent
WhatsApp on Android
Slack, Discord themes
See the whole set the way each system draws it — iPhone emojis, Android emojis, WhatsApp emojis and Discord emojis.
Bento Box emoji copy and paste
Tap any value to copy it. The emoji itself works everywhere, the escapes are for your code, and the shortcode Slack and Discord expect is :bento:.
In your code
Escapes for the languages people actually paste this into. Every one of them produces the same character, and that character is U+1F371.
How to type the 🍱 Bento Box emoji
Every system hides the emoji key somewhere else. Here is where, plus the raw codes for U+1F371 when there is no key at all.
Bento Box emoji PNG and SVG
Transparent PNG and SVG for thumbnails, decks and design files — one file per vendor, which makes 9. Artwork belongs to whoever drew it, so check the licence before commercial use.
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Bento Box emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around bento box for bios, captions and comments. Tap to copy.
Want two emojis fused into one sticker instead of set side by side? Emoji Kitchen does that with 🍱, and there are more ready-made pairs in emoji combinations and aesthetic emoji combos.
What 🍱 means from a girl or a guy
Same emoji, different intent depending on who sent it and what came before.
What 🍱 means in other countries
Reads as a neat, prepared meal — in Japan tied to daily routine, elsewhere more of an aesthetic “meal prep” reference.
An everyday school or work lunch, often homemade with care as a small gesture.
Used more for aesthetic meal-prep or lunchbox photos than daily necessity.
Before you send it: Works fine anywhere; just know it signals routine in Japan, not a special occasion.
What 🍱 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
The character is the same everywhere, but the artwork and the reading of it change from app to app.
Where the 🍱 Bento Box emoji came from
This one is older than Unicode emoji: Japanese carriers were drawing it on their handsets years before the standard existed, which it finally joined in 2010.
Same character every time — U+1F371 never changed. Only the drawing did, and only because each vendor redraws its own set. Someone on an older phone still sees the older picture.
Long before Unicode had emoji, Japanese carriers shipped their own picture sets.
🍱 existed there as
KDDI au EABD, SoftBank E34C.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Bento Box was approved as U+1F371 and shipped in Emoji 0.6 (2010). Emoji 0.6 is the original 2010 batch that came over from the Japanese sets.
Every vendor keeps its own artwork, so 🍱 is redrawn by Apple, Google, Twitter / X, Facebook, OpenMoji, Samsung, Microsoft, WhatsApp, JoyPixels. The character you send never changes — only the picture does.