Nestle Adult Sweetness Matcha KitKat campaign and Gran Wafer

As I've mentioned before, Nestle Japan has changed its marketing. The days of a revolving door or weird flavors seem to be over. Indeed, they are now focusing a lot of attention on expanding their market toward less sweet and relatively approachable flavors. The core product line is split between regular milk chocolate KitKats in various types of packaing, regional KitKats, and the adult sweetness line. 

The adult sweetness line is offered in white, semisweet, and green tea flavors. They're all good, but, surprisingly, I like the green tea one best. I say that because I'm not a huge green tea fan. However, the texture and mixture of bitter and sweet flavors make it a pretty extraordinary mixture of the elements. 

Nestle Japan is pretty savvy in how they're shifting the product line and marketing. The birth rate in Japan was 1.3 for 2012. That means the number of kids out there looking to try new candy is going down while the number of adults is much higher. They're going where the money is, and catering to conservative tastes (less sweet, more common and known flavors). 

They've done their marketing and 70% of women between the ages of 20-30 are pleased with the matcha adult sweetness KitKat. Their PR talks about how the changes in Japanese society are creating a situation in which women are expected to work late just as men are and they want to position their candy as a way of relieving stress. To that end, they've made a few commercials showing a very thin Japanese business woman being given candy to help her get through the trials and tribulations of her day. 

Blogger won't let me embed a video from YouTube Japan, but I'll link to each one here. The one for a green tea KitKat shows the hapless heroine apologizing in English as foreign guests exit. Everything is just fine though after her coworker hands her a box with a green tea KitKat and she munches on it. The second one, for the bittersweet version, shows her exiting a meaning after apparently having done some sort of poor job and being consoled by the same coworker with candy again. Yes, professional failure can always be fixed with candy. 

Though this is a pretty stupid set of commercials, which makes it little different from most commercials, the focus is a good one. Many Japanese women have sweets while they're working at the office. They don't eat copious amounts of them, but every female coworker I ever had in Japan kept snacks in her desk. Nestle figures that it might as well be a KitKat. 

Beyond catering to the needs of hapless female business people, they're encouraging housewives to enjoy a "gran wafer" with their coffee while their tots nap. The gran wafer (which appears to have lost a "d" somewhere along the way) is a KitKat with chocolate wafers with chocolate between them and no chocolate coating. It is, essentially, a sugar wafer. They're sold 9 to a box as minis, so, you can "have a break", but not a very big one. I guess moms with sewing machines need to sugar-up a bit less than office workers. 

Random Picture #155

A cute mascot is a terrible thing to waste. Bourbon can't display their colorful bears enough on their long sleeves of tiny cookies, so they are selling canisters full of 6 different types of their "petit" products. The types include "cocoa" cookies, digestive, butter, a Ritz-style cracker, and cheese and sesame or black pepper crackers (the angle of the tin makes it impossible to read the description, but that's what it looks like). I didn't buy one of these (though it is sort of cute), but I wouldn't be shocked if the tin is fully of individually wrapped cookies with each in its own sealed plastic packet. One thing about Japan is that they know the only way to encourage people to buy larger portions is to make sure the contents don't go stale over a longish period of time.

When I was in Tokyo, I occasionally saw such types of tins (though this one is newish and I never saw it) in the recyclable trash bin. They're popular for all types of cookies because they prevent crushing. I wondered if anyone ever saved them for storing other items. I know that my company got several of these a year, and we never saved them because the president of the company didn't like the "dirty" look of using such things for storage of office items. 

Nestle Ujimatcha Latte KitKat

Back when I did my Regional KitKats post, I mentioned that there was no need to despair over not being able to get these supposedly limited options because many of them have been released or will be released as regular flavors. Ujimatcha is a type of green tea grown in the Uji area and is known for being intense and sweet because the amino acids are kept intact when it is prepared. I don't know if this is true, or exactly what it means, but it's supposed to be vibrantly green and more finely milled than more pedestrian types of green tea. Uji is an area in Kyoto, and this is sold as a regional flavor KitKat.

The package you're seeing pictured here is a consumer level bag of minis sold pretty much anywhere that sells them. So, you see, no matter where you live, you can get this supposedly regional flavor. So there! Okay, this isn't exactly the same as the regional one since this has a semi-sweet chocolate base paired with the white chocolate ujimatcha top and is a "latte" flavor and the regional one is all green tea.

I found this as Nijiya Japanese market for $2.19 (206 yen). It's a pack of 7 single finger mini bars that look like a fat version of half a mini bar. For the quantity, it's slightly pricey, but not ridiculous. The strange thing about this KitKat was that I couldn't locate it on Nestle Japan's web site. That doesn't mean it's not there, but it is strange that it is not featured prominently somewhere. I do check the site regularly, and the expiration date on the bag is September 2013, so it can't be so old that it is outdated. This is the sort of thing that you think about when you're me.

As for the bar itself, it is actually quite different from the regular green tea KitKat. This has a creamy flavor which balances out both the semisweet base and bitter green tea very nicely. I generally don't care for green tea mixed with fairly present chocolate flavors, but it all came together really well in this tiny little bar. It has depth of flavor, but it doesn't come across as lacking in flavor harmony. It's neither too sweet nor lacking in sweetness. I was surprised at how nice it is.

I think this is absolutely one of the nicer consumer-level chocolates you can buy and well worth a sampling if none of the component flavors are something you're averse to. I could see this particular flavor profile with a better quality chocolate being produced by a more prestigious chocolatier. That being said, I still like the adult sweetness green tea bar better, but not by a huge margin.

Variety Friday: Japanese Easter

Images from Fujiya's web site except where noted

I think many Japanese people have an inkling about the roots of Christmas. Though they don't really think much about it, I believe many know it's related to Christian beliefs and may even have been taught in high school that it relates to celebrating the birth of Jesus. Some of my students told me that they were given the basic details some time back when they were kids, but I doubt anyone ever gave them the inside scoop on Easter.

"Colorful Egg Tart". It's not an egg tart, but a tart with a couple of confectionary eggs. 

The concept of Easter is based on a bit more mysticism than Christmas. It's all well and good to talk about babies being born. It's another to speak of the brutality of being crucified and being resurrected. It's not exactly the stuff of the "happy fun life" that you see in Japan. They've got their own mysticism and beliefs already. They don't need more.

A bunny cake with strawberry ears, obviously.

That being said, they can always use more commercial opportunities. Christmas has been folded in so nicely that they have their own traditions for it. Halloween has been gaining a foothold over the past couple of decades and they are closing in on having their own ways of celebrating it. I'm guessing that it ultimately will end up as a situation where children get treats from participating businesses. That's what was happening in my neighborhood when I left Japan. 

Peko "sweet egg" with some pretty pedestrian treats (hard candy, lollipops, chocolate). 

Easter is a whole, fresh, wide world of opportunity, and it's quite a doozy. The pastel colors, the happy Easter bunny, cute chicks, and sweets of all sorts. There's not much to dislike about Easter, except for that pesky serious stuff that actually underlies the whole deal, but that can be swept under the rug. It's not like much of the West isn't doing that as well.

 

Mont blanc, which is cake with a cream filling and chestnut cream on top.

As someone who has been paying attention to food and food marketing in Japan for quite awhile, and who has seen a lot of change over the 23 years I spent in Japan, it's interesting to take note of which companies are latching onto the potential of Easter and which ones are ignoring it. Chocolate makers like Meiji and Morinaga don't appear to be doing much at all to capitalize on the holiday. Confectioners and those who sell freshly made sweets are embracing it. 

Easter Variety Box, ice cream on the half "shell"

Besides Fujiya, Baskin Robbins Japan has been selling special Easter ice cream products for the last several years. In 2012, they were selling plastic eggs full of ice cream. In addition to bringing those back, they're also selling the "sundaes" pictured below and a fruit drink which has little to do with Easter, but is a seasonal offering nonetheless. 

Image from Baskin Robbins Japan. 

I wonder if Easter may not have caught on in Japan because it coincides with spring celebrations. It's not like the Japanese don't have plenty of good times on their own with the changing of the season with cherry blossom viewing and all. They even have their own flavors and foods associated with the season. Frankly, some part of me is a little sad to see the crassness of the holiday make its way into Japan. I'm in no way a cultural purist, but I do know that, despite all of the designer bags and conspicuous consumption there, it's not nearly as consumerist as it could potentially be when it comes to holidays. These sort of imported holidays seem like heading down a path toward a much higher level of such types of celebrations, and I don't really see that as a good thing. 

Burger King Japan's 500% Onion Burger (bonus post)

This is a quick post mainly to mention one of Burger King Japan's goofier options. As you can see above (and by my headline), they're selling a burger with 500% more onion. As a great fan of onions (my husband and I go through an enormous bag about once a month), this doesn't sound too bad, but it seems like an odd selling point to offer a teriyaki burger with 5 slices of onion. You can go back to work with 500% more obnoxious breath than usual.

A campaign for the burger was started on March 8 and the usual price is 880 yen ($9.18), but you can get your onion on for a mere 680 yen ($7.09) while the campaign is rolling. The other prices are for "set" meals (the burger with fries and a drink). Obviously, onions don't come cheap in Japan.

This is actually one of those things which is funkier than it seems. Would a burger ever be marketed here in the U.S. with 500% more onion (or any other vegetable)? I think not. ;-)