A Kit Kat for all seasons
From cherry blossoms to samurai to housing, the Japanese sure have a thing for the short lived, and especially for 限定商品 (gentei syouhin) — seasonal, regional or limited edition products. Restaurant menus and convenience store goods often reflect the tastes of the times, and offerings may range from the more mundane, like oysters as a wintertime topping for your okonomiyaki, to the more unexpected, such as the elusive cucumber-flavored Pepsi.
While products may come and go, one ever-changing supermarket staple continues to be the new and often unusual flavors of Kit Kat. Personally I am a big fan of the sakura variety that hits every graduation season, and I’m always sad when the soft pink boxes disappear from conbini shelves come the end of Spring. But just because something is new and different of course doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s particularly good, as was the case when I encountered grape Kit Kat, so I was a bit wary when I found the latest summer offering at my local suupaa:
すいか (watermelon) would not be the first on my list of “flavors matching chocolate and wafer,” but the further enticement of added salt (because, really, what’s watermelon without salt?) convinced me to ignore Better Judgment and drop a bag into my shopping basket.
After ample refrigeration, I finally tore open the packaging and had my first taste of the promised watermelon-salt-chocolate-wafer goodness. The stalwart chocolate and wafer were definitely making their contribution but the watermelon and salt… not so much. It did have some vague “fruit taste” but no distinct watermelon notes. Certainly no competition to the sakura variety, but happily still Kit Kat and still edible.
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Haven’t tried anything other than regular. I’d like to though.
thats not fair -we only have chocolate and white chocaolate kit kat in my country
i tasted the shoyu kit-kat which sounds totally gross but ends up tasting great
it’s actually like maple syrup with a slight shoyu ting
i’ve always wanted to try the shoyu flavor, but i think that was a tokyo/kanto thing? i wonder if they’ll ever release a sauce (e.g. worcestershire-based) flavor for kansai O_O
KINAKO! ! !
i only found it once last April and never saw it again! ! !
it was AWESOME
There was a red wine Kit Kat several years back. Quite tasty.
See, I was just about to mention that, but I didn’t think it was so good. Paerhaps I was expecting a merlot instead of a more pinot noir type taste…
I only know the normal choco one and white choco. I would love to try the others though but in germany… well… i never saw those for sale.
Funny how Nestle seems to not even try for a short time to bring some into the markets here just to see if people would like it. Japan on the other hand just gets the “different” or “weird” stuff, prolly cause they got a lot of other weird things already? Hrmmm!
Oh my god, the passion fruit Kit Kat they made a couple of years ago. It was the bestest and I still miss it sometimes…
The passion fruit was great. Apple deserves a mention, too.
The pudding flavor was top notch.
The suika was alright. Could have used more suika flavor though.
Can’t wait to try other seasonal kit-kats though
Japan loves various flavors and such and brands that are crap elsewhere (like Fanta) are actually pretty good here.
My fave is the orange Yubar mellon type
Other: lemon. Addictive!
Worst flavour: green-tea-and-azuki-bean, positively the most violently horrible confectionary I have experienced.
Kiwifruit!
Gotta agree, these were awesome last year.
i believe 2 years ago, i spotted a wasabi flavoured Kitkat in Ueno
Black tea, which was dark chocolate with black tea-flavored creme inside. Absolutely fantastic, and maddeningly impossible to find.