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.

Fujiya Look Crispy Chocolate Snack Assort

When I was a child, I used to anthropomorphize everything. To those who didn't study General Psychology, or washed it all out of their brain with beer after taking the final exam, that means I used to assign human feelings and attributes to inanimate objects. To that end, I'd feel sad for things which were not popular or unwanted. I'd feel guilty when a toy didn't get played with, and this was before "Toy Story" put the notion into people's heads that toys lead animated and interesting lives when their owner isn't around.

Walking around the closest convenience store and its quake-induced-panic-buying decimated shelves, I looked at the sad sacks of unpurchased snacks and felt a little of that old sense of anthropomorphism. I felt bad for the Hello Kitty chocolate-covered puffs that resembled Styrofoam in the cutaway image, and for these bags of Look chocolates. What did they do to be left out of the disaster-induced-hoarding love? Meiji chocolate bars are definitely the teacher's pet of earthquake shoppers. Perhaps Fujiya doesn't inspire notions of soundness and shelf stability. I blame the Fujiya Girl with her lolling tongue and somewhat goggly eyes. Nobody wants to see that in a crisis.

Honestly, I don't know why these were left behind as I'd actually bought a package of the chocolate wafers that make up half of the bag before and liked them. For 100 yen ($1.24), this was a nice portion (18 pieces about the size of an American dime or one-yen coin) of candy for the price and, hey, chocolate! Each is individually wrapped and about a bite unless you're me and then it's two bites because you need a picture of the inside of the candy for your blog.

The main selling point for these is that they've got crispy innards under their layers of milk chocolate, and they do live up to that. The flavor of Fujiya chocolates is rather unique compared to other Japanese chocolates and one that I've come to recognize after sampling other offerings. It's hard to explain what that flavor is, but it's just a hint of a floral chemical taste. It's not offensive, but it is distinctive.

Yes, I had to bite them in half for a cutaway. The chocolate is too thick to cut through them with a knife. It makes for bad pictures, but tasty chocolates!

The candies themselves are pretty run of the mill decent quality consumer level chocolate covered wafer offerings in two varieties: "crepe" (22 calories) and "wafer" (24 calories). In terms of taste, the wafers, which have a tiny sugar wafer inside, have a little more sweetness because of the cream filling. The wafers themselves have a somewhat wheaty and earthy flavor which adds some distinction between the two candies. The "crepe" version has a mild waffle cone flavor going on. Both are mainly about the milk chocolate though.

I am not doing handsprings over these, but I liked them because I adore chocolate-covered crispy things and wafers in particular. I also love milk chocolate. This is not a unique offering or something for connoisseurs who want something that challenges or enlivens the palate. They are a decent pedestrian candy though, and I'd buy them again even if the shelves weren't picked over by quake panic shoppers.