I know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn’t kit kat just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal with the boner these companies have about withholding certain flavors in certain markets?
For chocolate bars and stuff like KitKats I can't think that I've hardly ever seen them use HFCS instead of sugar. Maybe in ones with a more liquid component. Like, I'm pretty sure even the lowly standard Hershey bar uses sugar.
Yes, I wasn't referring specifically to japanese kitkats - I don't know what's in them, been a couple years. But the use of palm oil has become pretty pervasive and (maybe it's placebo effect) the flavour has declined.
That's pretty much true of most overseas candies and chocolates. Some of the best chocolates from Europe use cocoa butter and real sugar. Not Processed Cocoa Powder, HFCS, additives, colorings, preservatives, and then tempered with plastic.
Costco doesn’t sell caseloads of Cocacola shipped all the way from Mexico to the north east because it’s “hipster bullshit.”
I’m in Europe right now and Coke tastes way better, and doesn’t leave a mild bad feeling after drinking it like it does in the US.
There is a significant chemical difference between sugar and HFCS. For one, the molecules in sugar are disaccharides while in HFCS they are free. High Fructose CS also has more fructose, which is the worst type of sugar. There’s a Wikipedia page I’ve been trying to find again for years, but basically fructose is multiple times more reactive in your blood than glucose and creates nasties when it reacts with other things you eat, namely fats.
> Costco doesn’t sell caseloads of Cocacola shipped all the way from Mexico to the north east because it’s “hipster bullshit.”
Costco sells a lot of good stuff but they also sell plenty of stuff because it is hipster bullshit. Case in point.
> There is a significant chemical difference between sugar and HFCS. For one, the molecules in sugar are disaccharides while in HFCS they are free.
And those molecules are enzymatically broken down to monosaccharides early on in your GI tract, long before it ever makes into your blood.
Sucrose is never absorbed into your bloodstream.
> but basically fructose is multiple times more reactive in your blood than glucose and creates nasties when it reacts with other things you eat, namely fats.
Yes and sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose and this dissociation occurs long before anything about the bloodstream enters the picture it happens right in the intestines mixing with all the other fatty Mexican and European garbage you’re eating.
All the bad shit you think happens with fructose will occur with “real” sugar consumption. So your reply or Wikipedia article would make no sense in this context hipster.
Being downvoted by the HN moron brigade (and I’m more referring to the parallel comment rather than mine) doesn’t change any simple scientific and physiologic facts.
By your logic eating sugar is the same as eating brown rice, since they’re both broken down before going into your blood. Sugar isn’t healthy, but HFCS is even worse, with measurably higher glycemic index. And as mentioned, it has more fructose (5%.)
“Compared with sucrose, HFCS leads to greater fructose systemic exposure and significantly different acute metabolic effects.”
No that is not by my logic, that is something you’re making up, I never brought up any completely different foods. Rice and refined sugar products are not the same. Try again.
Again because you are obviously slow (too much sugar?): sugar (like HFCS) is a refined product, it will have similar glycemic index to HFCS. The enzymatic breakdown of sucrose is fast enough not to matter.
Rice is not, stop muddying the waters with irrelevant bullshit.
There is no evidence that the 5% difference in fructose content between usual HFCS and sucrose is of any consequence for health outcomes.
Costco selling caseloads is a pretty strong argument that it might be hipster bullshit given Costco’s market demographics.
IIRC there have been a few studies on the Coca Cola and the biggest thing is being told it’s Mexican coke and having it be in a cold glass bottle - real sugar coke in a can or glass ranked lower than HFCS coke in a glass bottle and misidentified.
Of course the cognoscenti know that the real deal is Coke in returnable bottles that are probably older than you are. No retornable is export shit.
I hadn’t heard about this origin story of Japanese KitKat before and looked it up.
Kitto katsu! means "you will surely win" or "you will surely succeed".
So it is given as tokens for success in exams and the like.
Katsu for winning/succeeding also can be seen in Tonkatsu = pork cutlet (katsu is the Japanese "shortening" of cutlet), which is also offered as a success token.
It's a reduced sugar bitter dark chocolate kitkat that they know kids won't like. Hence "Otona No Amasa" or "sweetness for adults" marketing. They have a bunch of flavors under that subbrand.
The manufacturers likely don't want to deal with additional SKUs and logistics for what is a low volume item in those regions. Allergies/ingredient disclosure might present challenges as well.
I don't think it's a boner over withholding flavors.
It's likely a profit boner. Margins on obscure flavors aren't projected to be high enough in whatever market, so they don't offer it. But in some other market, projections look good, so they offer it.
The untold thing here is that the KitKats are honestly not that good. The best ones are basically "huh, kinda intersting odd flavor", but especially in Europe I've only basically been met with disgust at the flavored kitkats.
They're good flavors, but not quite mass market compatible outside Japan I'd presume. I used to live in a city with a large japanese enclave and they were pretty well available from local asian grocery stores, though still 5 times as expensive as regular.
It certainly seems strange. But maybe the demand from a relatively few Japanophiles doesn't outweigh the adminstrative costs of maintaining a much larger number of SKUs (including regulatory requirements) and they'd send boxes of green tea chocolate to go out of date on shelves. I'd have thought a big corporate would have pretty scalable product range management but maybe it's just cheaper to hand that off to importers. Some calculation must presumably be involved.
Though I like to think the Nestlé/Hershey executives have been threatened by immaculately-suited Pocky-toting enforcers of the importers making profits on the novelty arbitrage.
Presumably in this case it has something to do with how Hershey owns the rights for Kit-Kat in the USA, but Nestle everywhere (at least as far as I know) else.
It does seem like Japanese brands are more optimized for smaller size and number of batches. Could be due to accommodating logistics, media hype culture, denser population, omnipresent convenience stores, etc.
It's also hard to understand just how popular KitKats are in Japan and how their products and limited time offers cater uniquely to the Japanese audience.
KitKat has a lot of competition in the UK where caramels are way more popular than weird KK flavors.
KitKat are already full of wafer so Mondelez wouldn't be motivated to 'put anything in the chocolate bar at all so long as it's not chocolate'. What's cheaper than wafer? I guess if they can make more of the inside wafer, so there's less chocolate coating?
Perhaps you can make wafer bubbly, so it's more air? Although it's cheaper to just put it in a plastic wrapper and fill the wrapper with nitrogen...
