The History of KitKats in Japan

What links baked potato, soy sauce, strawberry milk and sports drinks? They’re all KitKat flavours, of course! Two years ago the marketing manager for KitKat in Japan won a corporate award for his work with the company. For this honour, he was presented with a golden trophy shaped like the iconic chocolate bar. Inspired by his statue, he came up with a new gold leaf covered wafer bar, which went on sale in Tokyo for around £14. This creation joined a long list of weird and whacky KitKat flavours that line the confectionary aisles in Japan. With an estimated 300 varieties, Japan is a paradise for lovers of the chocolatey treat, and some even travel to the country just to get a taste!

Flavour options range from traditional Japanese staple flavours, such as wasabi, sake and green tea, to sweeter tastes like melon, blueberry cheesecake and cherry blossom.

The KitKat bar originates from England in 1935 and didn’t actually make its way to Japan until 1973. The KitKat really took off in Japan in the 1990s, when souvenier shops on the island of Hokkaido were provided with strawberry-flavoured KitKats in an attempt to diversify the range of snacks available there. The bars took off, and more and more limited edition varieties were introduced, further boosting the popularity.

One of the reasons behind the popularity of this tasty treat is that the practice of giving sweets as a gift is a national custom, so receiving KitKats for Christmas would not be uncommon! Japan also holds a deep sense of pride in its culinary traditions and flavours, so welcome those intriguing flavours like matcha, adzuki bean and Shinshu apple. Another reason is that KitKat sounds like ‘kitto katsu’, meaning ‘you will surely win’, which is considered a good luck message. Cashing in on this lucky meaning, KitKat began a postal service that allowed students to send each other the bars as a good luck symbol before the exam period for the high-pressure university entrance tests.

Between 2010 and 2016, KitKat sales rose by fifty percent, leading to the company opening a new manufacturing plant in Japan to keep up with the demand. Since those first strawberry-flavoured bars, twenty new flavours of KitKat are produced each year, and the flavours put on shelves are replaced every two months.

The KitKat sales don’t stop at the chocolate wafers though, with a KitKat-specific store – called Chocolatory – established this year. As well as serving limited edition bars, such as the gold-leaf KitKat, the store dishes up KitKat Sushi. Don’t worry, no salmon or mackerel is involved! The fun-sized bars, including pumpkin pudding an Hokkaido melon, are placed on puffed rice and wrapped in seaweed.

Of course, some flavours don’t catch on. The recently released ‘cough drop’ flavour has proved to be a bit of a flop, as was the ‘sports drink’ flavour that lined the shelves back in 2009. But with so many popular flavours available, these occasional failures, while disappointing, don’t prove too much of a hit!

What flavour of KitKat would you like to see here in England? Let us know on social media! Be sure to check out the range of Oriental sweets available at Oriental Mart too!