Riska Shittori Kinako Snack

When I was teaching enormous numbers of business students (via telephone - about 300 per busy season), they often talked about building brand name loyalty with their customers. These were companies like Toyota, Sumitomo, Brother, and Nippon Denso. In their cases, loyalty meant some pretty big bucks as they didn't sell tiny things.

The way in which they cultivated this greatly valued loyalty was to lavish attention on customers who worked at the upper management levels. They sent out the same salesman and he'd sweet talk the client. After years of working together, it was that much harder for the customer to move along to a cheaper vendor. Snack companies don't have the luxury of taking it to the customer on that level - both because they have too many of them and their products are so low margin.

So, how does a snack company build brand allegiance? It's something that I pondered because I tried this Riska product, loved it, and then realized the brand makes a good number of economical and tasty snacks, but no one pays much attention to them. If I look back through my blog at all of the Riska products I've reviewed, I liked every one of them and two of them, Corn Potage and Heart Chipple, are in the pantheon of my all time favorite salty snacks.

I'm wondering what it is that Riska isn't doing to build brand loyalty. In my opinion, they have the goods, but they don't have the profile. Someone at Riska should get on that. And, they should also try to export more of their products to the U.S.

This snack is a kinako (toasted soy flour) version of the more common chocolate variety. Like the chocolate version, this has a somewhat puffy, but crisp corn base. You can see from the picture that they're rather airy. Think about the inside of a corn-puff snack with bigger air holes (like an expanded and less crispy Cheeto). "Shittori" means "moist" and the crispy nature of these corn puffs seems to be softened a bit by the white-chocolate based coating. The coating is flavored with kinako, so it has a bit of the nutty soy flavor that one associates with toasted soy powder. It's sweet, but far from cloying and the kinako flavor pairs very well with the muted, earthy corn flavors. It's a much better match than the chocolate in the original version.

A whole bag of these is 80 grams/2.8 oz. I paid $1.58 (161 yen) at Marukai Japanese market (a veritable bargain for a Japanese import). It's a lot of snack for the price and the whole bag is 446 calories. However, it's supposed to be three servings so it's only lethal if you pig out. Tempting as that may be, I've found that you enjoy them more if you put some limits in place as the acclimation to the taste will limit your enjoyment over time.

I loved these, but I also love kinako. I would definitely buy these again and I hope that Riska ups its brand profile and gets into more markets. Even in Japan, I tended not to see them everywhere and it's even harder to find them here in the U.S. If you can find them, I'd recommend giving them a try.

Riska Moist Chocolate Corn Snack

There are a lot of things about actually living in Japan rather than acquiring Japanese snacks through various channels in another country which make the experience unique. One is that I can never help people out when they ask me how to find something outside of Japan. I have many opportunities to feel profoundly useless to people on multiple occasions. Another is that I have tastes which are "normalized" to Japanese food such that they don't strike me as profoundly unique compared to other reviewers. I've noticed that people who infrequently review Japanese snacks tend to rate them more highly than I do. I think this is because they are comparing them to a different standard than me.

This notion comes to mind as I review this snack because I'm sure I'm experiencing it differently than those who haven't sampled most of Riska's line of products. If you've never tried their salty corn snacks, you won't realize that this is simply a chocolate-covered version of their basic corn puff recipe. In fact, it tastes almost exactly like their corn potage snack without the savory powdery coating. These are covered with a very satisfying layer of chocolate which is quite sweet, but still potent. Quite often, these cheap (80 grams for 100 yen/2.8 oz. for $1.30) snacks have very weak chocolate flavor, but these are quite good and flavorful. The initial taste is a burst of milk chocolate sweetness, but it is chased by the corn snack flavor which feels like it just doesn't belong. I'm not sure if I perceive them that way because I so strongly associate this taste with salty snacks or if they really aren't a great pairing. It feels like something like chocolate-covered Doritos, only not nearly as gross.

I'm rather torn about these. They're soft and crunchy at the same time and very satisfying on a textural level. They're sweet and strong, but the flavors don't quite match on my taste buds. Frankly, they strike me as  the sort of "junk food" that I could easily see eating the entire bag of and then being filled with regret that I spent 466 calories (about 12 calories per piece) on something that wasn't completely worth it. Then, I could see doing it again in the future. This is classic "good" bad food (including processed fat) which is easy to gobble down in great quantity, but if you pause and attempt to savor every bite, you'll probably not be nearly as happy with the experience. So, I'm offering this a conditional "happy" rating. If you're looking to pig out, these are great. If you're looking for a high quality experience to linger over, there's nothing to see here, move along.

Cheese Rounds (Marui Cheezu) Snack

For foreign folks, there is no more treacherous territory in Japan than snacks and sweets purporting to be "cheese". On the sweet side, you have to brave sponge and cheesecakes made with the likes of Gouda or even variations on cheddar. You can buy a lovely looking sponge cake and get hit with a tangy, savory cheese bomb when you bite into it. On the salty side, more often than not, you get flat, lifeless moderately salty corn puffs or chips with flavorless yellow or orange dust.

Personally, I like my cheese flavor strong on a salted snack. The purpose of the delivery device is to bring the crunch and the flavor is supposed to be carried in the powder. Planter's used to sell canisters of "Cheese Balls" (possibly "Cheeze Balls", I'm not up on my dubious spelling) which was the sublime embodiment of salted cheese snack treats. This is the gold standard by which all cheese snacks should be judged. They were so well-loved that there's one of those useless Internet petitions begging Planter's to bring them back.


Enter Riska's Cheese Rounds. These can be bought for 27 yen per 17 gram bag/.6 oz. (or 4 bags for a dollar/99 yen). The portion is small, but should be attractive to folks who want 100 calorie deliveries since the bag of 12 or so rings is 94 calories. The question is, are these rings a worthy competitor for Planter's Cheese Balls? The answer is, they are not only worthy to compete, but to succeed. They even have an anthropomorphic mascot on the cover to duke it out with Mr. Peanut. If you can't tell, that's a very excited pan of melted cheese with broccoli on his fork on the package cover. Mr. Peanut has limbs to punch and kick with, but this pan is piping hot and armed. It'd be one hell of a cartoon mascot match.

When you open the bag, it smells tangy and cheesy. The texture of the rings is crispy and light. There is a lot of flavored powder on the rings, but it doesn't stick to your fingers as badly as the powder from something like a Cheeto, though it does adhere to your fingers a little. The taste is richly cheesy, slightly salty, and a little buttery. One of the ingredients is "creaming powder", so that may be where the buttery sense comes from. It also includes whey, paprika, cheese powder, Sucralose, and added calcium. I've noticed that just the right amount of sweetness is often mixed into Riska salted snacks to enhance their savory nature.

These are not only the best cheese snacks I've had in Japan, but possibly better than any I've had in the U.S. If you find yourself in a Japanese market looking for cheesy munchies, skip the imported or domestic Cheetos which are so readily available and track down a bag of Riska's Cheese Rounds. You won't regret it.

Nihon Nagai Choco (Japan Long Chocolate)

There is a class of snacks in Japan for which I'd like to coin a new term. I christen this group of food items "little big snacks"®. These are items that are strangely large, but marketed as if they were normal size or even small snacks. This kid's treat (brought to you by Riska, maker of all sorts of cheap kid's snacks) called Nihon nagai choco falls into that odd category. Incidentally, "nagai" means "long" in Japanese.

The packaging on this is rather interesting because it is on the sexist side. If you click on the small picture at left to see a more legible size, you'll see that there are three cartoon characters with words written above them in English. The top one says "mama", the center one "boku", and the bottom one "papa". "Boku" is the way in which males can refer to themselves. That is, it's a manly way of saying "me" or "I". Women and girls never say "boku". Papa also gets a repeat viewing on the back and mama gets one lousy picture.

So, boys are supposed to look at this and say, "Here's my boyish/manly snack as indicated by my family's depiction on the label. Aren't I a little big man?" Okay, he's not going to say that. I'm guessing what he's going to say is something like, "why did my cheap ass parents buy me a 27 yen snack stick instead of a Wii?".

This is a typical kid's treat in Japan. It's super light, coated in a light film of fake chocolate, and made of corn. It's also fortified with calcium. The whole stick is 126 calories despite the fact that it's about 10 inches (25.4 cm) long. It's chock full of air pockets, but this doesn't have to be a bad thing. Air has no calories, after all.

You could pretend it's a super long cigar or, um, something else that resembles a long, brown log.

When you open the package, it smells very good. It smells of peanuts, cocoa, and sugar (all of which are ingredients, unsurprisingly). When you bite into it, you get a heavy hit of cereal taste. If you imagine a crispy rice bit from a Nestle Crunch blown up to gargantuan size and elongated, I imagine that's what this is. It's very crunchy and plenty sweet, although not in a sugary burning of your throat manner. The chocolate taste is surprisingly rich for such a thin coating, though there are no discernible peanut notes.

When you look at it on end like this, it looks like the suckers at the end of a squid's tentacles. But, that might just be my impression.

All in all, this is one pleasant little big treat. It's got great texture and just enough flavor to blend in with the cereal base inside. Keep in mind that there are other brands of this sort of thing out there and not all of them are good. I've had one of these before as part of a Japanese Christmas treat pack and sampled another one given to my husband and neither was as nice as this one from Riska. Apparently, brand name matters even in super cheap kid's snacks.

If you're in the mood for something crunchy and sweet, but a bit lighter than a Crunky bar, I'd recommend giving this a try. For 27 yen, it's a sure winner, though you may have to pretend you're a boy while you eat it.

Corn Potage Snack

Everyone associates Japan with sushi, seafood, and rice. Japanese people have a few guilty nutritional secrets that you don't really notice unless you live here for awhile. The first "secret" is that the Japanese love mayonnaise. In fact, there are fan clubs devoted to mayonnaise. I sometimes joked that mayonnaise is the fourth food group in Japan because they can consume it in great abundance.

The second "secret", however, is the one that applies here. That one is that the Japanese love corn. Many newcomers to Japan are appalled to learn that you can order it as a topping on pizza. Back when I first arrived, my husband and I used to occasionally stop by a Shakey's Pizza while we were out shopping. Shakey's offered lunch time buffets at which you could eat as much as you wanted provided you were willing to eat whatever types of pizza they happened to put out there. We were displeased to learn that tuna and corn was the only variety on offer.

If you peruse convenience store baked goods, you'll often find an unholy marriage of these two secret loves in a corn and mayo sandwich. Well, it's not really a sandwich. It's a white hot dog bun type of thing topped with mayonnaise and corn. I can promise you right now that I won't be reviewing that nutri-bomb of bad carbs and fat.

Getting back to corn though. One of the more popular varieties of soup in Japan is corn potage. You can buy it in cans, as an instant powdered cup of soup mix or you can get it in family-size bags so that the whole family can put away some tasty cream corn soup. This particular flavor is what the makers of this corn snack are trying to reproduce.


This salted snack item is brought to you by Riska which makes a variety of small bags of cheap snacks for 27 yen each (about 25 cents USD). The bag contains 20 grams (.7 oz.) of puffy, light yellow corn puffs. They are airy and smell like sweet corn. Each puff is covered with a light yellow powder and a few flecks of parsley. The powder is hard to see because it is the same color as the puffs and sticks pretty well.

These are very crispy and really couldn't be better on the texture side. They taste both salty and sweet. This is no doubt to reproduce the sweet notes corn sometimes carries and is managed by adding Sucralose to the mix. The flavor is intensely savory, but very reminiscent of instant corn potage soup. Quite frankly, I love these and if I were looking for a crispy, salty snack, this would definitely be something I'd want to partake of.

I once sent a bag of these to a friend living in the U.S. and he told me they reminded him of Cap'n Crunch cereal. I can see where they might bring that to mind with their sweetness and crunch. Cap'n Crunch is, after all, made from corn (and oats). However, they are much airier and more like a cheese puff or ball so I think the comparison stops there. Also, there is no actual sugar in these and eating one of these 20 gram bags will set you back 118 calories. I'm guessing that's a better bet than 20 grams of Cap'n Crunch, and these won't cut up the roof of your mouth.

Riska Super Heart Chiple

The top of the bag says something like 'heart poundingly delicious.'

One of the local convenience stores near my home is a 99 yen (about $1) store. While many of the items are 99 yen, some are actually cheaper. There is a selection of small bags of salted snacks which are 4 bags for 99 yen or about a quarter/25 yen apiece. I'm not sure if these small bags are there for portion control or if they are directed toward children, but they are stocked near a variety of sweets that are definitely directed toward kids.

In the past, I've purchased "Christmas Packs" directed toward kids which contain a variety of snack items including salted snacks and sweets. One point I noticed about them was that they tended to contain "junk food" which was a bit less junky than those items marketed toward adults. This bag of Super Heart Chiple seems to fit the same mold. The chips are not made with potatoes. They are made with non-glutinous rice and resemble extremely light sembei both in texture and flavor.


Each chip is super light, heart-shaped and has little bumps on it as if it were cooked on a patterned baking sheet. While fat is the second ingredient, I don't believe these were deep fried. They are not overly oily, but they are shiny and (very marginally) greasy-feeling on the outside. The red dust on the outside is paprika.

When you open the bag, you get a whiff of garlic. The front of the package shows a garlic bulb and says that they've improved the garlic flavor. The chips are savory and lightly salty. Despite the flames around the garlic bulb, they are not actually hot though you can experience a cumulative hot garlic effect. The spiciness level is really quite pleasant and well-balanced. They do leave a pretty garlicky aftertaste in your mouth though so you don't want to eat them if you're in a position to offend someone else with your breath.

The company that makes these, Riska, is not a well-known brand. They appear to specialize in these sorts of cheap snacks and I wasn't surprised to see that they produce a lot of the bags of snacks in the section which offers 4 for 99 yen at the local store. They also seem to be responsible for a variety of children's sweets. The company is relatively young by Japanese standards, having been started in 1971. Like many companies, they have a quaint "philosophy" meant to humanize public perception of them rather than view them as merely a business. The company's production concept is "heart mind". The idea is that the "mind" part is related to technological advances and the "heart" relates to keeping the quality and touch of hand-made products.

The entire bag of chips is 15 grams (1/2 ounce) which doesn't sound like much, but there is a lot of crispy enjoyment in it. It's light because the chips are puffy. I didn't count, but I think there may be 20-25 chips in the small bag and it's only 84 calories. The main thing about these which may not be attractive to some foreign palates is that they do taste like sembei (rice crackers). If you like sembei and garlic, you will very likely enjoy these and they will offer you something salty which isn't as bad for you as a bag of chips. I certainly will be revisiting these next time I want something salty and crispy.