Aero Setsubun Black Soy Chocolate Bar

The Aero black soy bar is Nestle Japan's second entry in the Setsubun marketing game.The red devil on the soy bean KitKat has been given a color job and been symbolically castrated by having his horns removed. This might be a girl demon. I'm not up on gender identification of devil and demon sorts.

I found this bar side-by-side with the Setsubun KitKat at Family Mart convenience store. Both bars are pretty much the same size, about 14 x 3 x 2 cm (5.5 x 1.2 x .8 in.) and cost 120 yen ($1.32). The bar has a bit of a rough-hewn pattern on the outside. I'm guessing this is supposed to resemble wood, but I can't imagine why. The information on the front says that this bar is .28% black soy. That small a quantity of a key ingredient seems to indicate that the people at Nestle Japan subscribe to the homeopathic notion that no matter how little of something you use, it can be effective.


The bar smells vaguely of soy flour (kinako) and has a gray bubbled interior. I ate my bar at room temperature, so the sometimes crunchy effect you get from eating catacombs of cold aerated chocolate didn't happen. Instead, I just got a soft, rich milk chocolate flavor and texture. It melts so quickly in your mouth that it seems like you've got a mouth full of warm fudge. It's a very sumptuous experience.

As milk chocolate bars go, this is very enjoyable. I've had Aero before, but mainly as smaller bars. I don't know if the tiny bit of black soybean in the bar enhanced the richness or simply that the thickness and room temperature chocolate made it seem more decadent, but I enjoyed this more than I remember regular Aero bars. That being said, I didn't taste the soy component at all.