Japanese Kit Kat Candy Bars

5/3/2018

Who Would Have Imagined That There Were Hundreds of Kit Kat Flavors

As you might have noticed my last blog post was back on 10 April; since then – nothing.

Well there’s a good reason for my lapse in posting – on 11 April we left for a 16-day trip to Japan and Korea. Since we returned on the 27th we’ve unpacked and started to get everything back on track. I’ve even had a chance to take an initial pass through the 2,500+ photos that I took on the trip. I plan on posting some of them over the weekend. In the meantime I thought that I would post about one of the fun things we searched for in Japan – Kit Kat candy bars.

In Japan Kit Kat candy bars are a big thing. In the US Hershey’s controls the brand – but in Japan Nestlé has control. To increase their sales Nestlé has played into the niche game. So where the US only has Milk Chocolate, Dark Chocolate and White Chocolate Kit Kats, in Japan there have been over 300 flavors of Kit Kats – with approximately 30 flavors normally for sale at one time.

They even have regional specialties that you can only purchase in certain parts of Japan and “high end” flavors that come from teaming with the “Chocolatory” specialty candy stores.

We didn’t buy every flavor that we saw (for example “Wasabi”) – but we did find 11 flavors that we thought would be worth trying:

1) Banana
2) Raspberry Biscuit
3) Japanese Strawberry
4) Sweet Sake
5) Cranberry and Almond
6) Green Tea, Cranberry, Raspberry and Almond
7) Sweet Potato and Adzuki Bean Dumplings
8) Iyokan Mandarin Orange
9) Hokkaido Spicy Cantaloupe and Mascarpone Cheese
10) Hiroshima Maple Buns
11) White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate

I’ll let you know how the side-by-side taste test goes.