Kitkat bars in Japan

Through some quirk of Nestle’s franchising of KitKat in Japan, a wide range of variant flavours is available, with each region of Japan offering a unique regional/seasonal taste. While in theory each flavour is only available in the region comes from, shop around at souvenir stores at places like Tokyo railway station or Narita airport and you should be able to find the whole range. Annoyingly they don’t do selection boxes, so if you want to try each flavour, you’ll have to buy a packet of each.

Flavours include strawberry, raspberry, melon, creme caramel, matcha (more bitter green tea), sake (rice wine), wasabi (spicy horseradish), strawberry cheesecake, apple, red bean, purple sweet potato (aka Ube), hojicha (less bitter green tea), chilli and pumpkin, with new ones being introduced all the time.

We would advise, not all of these flavours are particularly nice (wasabi and sake for example), so when giving as a gift consider it’s for the novelty factor, not the taste. Note also that the standard size for a KitKat in Japan is half the length of a standard twin finger bar in the rest of the world. Or about one mouthful. Value for money they are not.

Thanks to a local trend of ‘baking’ the KitKats so that the chocolate melts, you can also find special packs of KitKats ‘designed’ to be baked, although in practice there’s little difference if any between normal and bake-able KitKats. Both can be eaten baked or unbaked, and the baking process doesn’t add anything if you ask us.

Pro tip: if you live in the UK, you can order most flavours of obscure Kit Kat from Japan Centre’s online store.