Since launching in Japan in 1973, British chocolate brand KitKat has become one of Japan’s most popular chocolate snacks. It’s also a huge hit amongst tourists, who are fascinated by its plethora of new, inventive and sometimes bizarre flavours that are only available here in the country. These include sake, cherry blossoms, cheesecake, sweet potato, edamame, cantaloupe, apple and even cough drops (really), just to name a few.
That’s not all: KitKat in Japan is also smaller compared to the four-finger portion sold elsewhere around the world. Here you’ll often find KitKat in family-size bags, each containing around 13 to 15 individually-wrapped, mini dual-bar portions. Now the size is about to change. Back in September, Nestle Japan announced that it’ll be revamping the chocolate bar’s recipe and size, making it smaller and adjusting it to cater to today's more health-conscious consumers.
According to KitKat Japan, it has noticed from consumer trends in recent years that many people have refrained from purchasing its chocolate bars due to concerns regarding calories and sugar intake. To solve this problem, it substituted some of the sugar with soy milk okara (soy pulp) and whole milk powder to reduce the sugar content by at least 10 percent. Also, the size of the new KitKat is also noticeably smaller (and shorter), with 1.6g lighter and about nine to ten calories less.
This new recipe and size only affects the six regular KitKat Minis that are available year-round. They are: original, bitter chocolate, matcha, rich matcha, hojicha and strawberry. These KitKat will feature ‘otona no amasa’ on the packaging, which roughly means ‘adult sweetness’.
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