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.

Yamachan's Shittori Sembei

One of the mistakes foreign folks make while living in Japan is concluding that they understand the country based on their little corner of the experience. The truth is that, like many countries, Japan is not one country with one uniform culture and one type of people. It's a small country compared to some others, but the culture is different in various regions. You can live here for decades and still never come across some aspects of the culture.

Sometimes little things remind me of this, and this snack was one of them. No matter how many foods I sample, companies I research, or packages I translate, I'll never know it all. There will always be things which are popular outside of my experience that I'll never know. I had never encountered "Yama-chan's" brand of food before coming across this packet of sembei at Peacock supermarket. It turns out that it is a chain of restaurants that sells a particular type of chicken wings. The nearest restaurant in this chain is about an hour from my apartment and many of the others are even further afield.

This sembei is supposed to mimic the distinctive seasoning of Yama-chan's chicken wings. Since I've never had their actual food, I can't speak to its verisimilitude to the real thing, but I can talk about it as a rice-based cracker snack. I found these at Peacock supermarket for 148 yen ($1.57). There were 17 largish crackers in the bag (about the size of a medium potato chip) and there were 195 calories in the whole bag (11.5 calories each).

They smelled rather peppery with some other spices mixed in. The taste was also quite peppery (as in black pepper) with some of the fried chicken taste you might expect. The pepper hits you first and the fried chicken spices second. The pepper tends to come back around at the end as it lingers on the tongue. These are "shittori" which means "moist" so the texture was rather softish compared to most sembei. They were very similar to the Sanshin curry sembei I reviewed before only with different seasoning. I didn't like the texture on those and I wasn't a great fan of the texture on these either. I guess I really need to avoid "shittori" sembei.

I ate the entire bag of these, but they really just tasted like black pepper and those packets of fried chicken seasoning powder that you can buy at supermarkets. The pepper dominated so much that I felt that I'd be better off just buying one of my favorite crispy black pepper sembei rather than this type. It wasn't bad at all, and I did enjoy the intense spiciness, but I wouldn't purchase it again.