I love crunchy candy. Crunky, Macademia, and even Pocky; crunchy food fills a certain segment of my sweet tooth. Now, I hardly ever prefer Lotte’s chocolate to other brands, but I thought I would give some of their new, crunchy, offerings a try: あられ (arare) and パン (pan) Ghana.

Arare, as I was not aware before trying it, is roasted mochi. If you’re not familiar with that, I’ll share my first reaction when I saw these: they look (and taste) like Cap’n Crunch dipped in chocolate. They’re light and fluffy, and primarily chocolatey. Mixed in is a touch of soy sauce, which tastes better than you might assume. Unlike some candies like this, Lotte doesn’t skimp too much on the quantity. While there’s only 42g of array chocolates, that’s something like 25 pieces, and a pretty filling snack.

Pan, being French for ‘bread,’ is exactly that. This candy is essentially the same as the first, only with sweet salad croutons. While the arare promised to be both サクサク (sakusaku), crispy, and フワフワ (fuwafuwa), fluffy, these crouton Ghana only promise to be crispy, which is understandable, because these are a little heavier than the Cap’n Crunch Ghana.

While both of these crispy chocolate snacks were a fun experience, neither really rose above the pack. As I mentioned in the beginning, Lotte chocolate really doesn’t do anything for me, and as a filling, I much prefer nuts or the mochi puffs from Crunky. They’re both pretty unique, though, and if you’re looking for a taste you can’t find outside of Asia, you could certainly do worse.

2/5

We couldn’t find these for sale in the usual places, so let us know in the comments if you know where to buy あられ (arare) and パン (pan) Ghana.

When I was a kid I did not like pie, and similar to many things related to my childhood I have no explanation of why I refused to eat it. I remember when I branched out and had some chocolate pie, it was ok, but it didn’t convince me that pie was anything to be missed. I continued to branch out (and got over my additional dislike of baked fruit) and tried more and more pies, but they still didn’t do it for me. Really guys, what is the big deal about pie? What I didn’t realize is that my life, like many American lives, was saturated with pie and I did like it. Pie is real Americana and now that I live in Japan, I miss pie. It’s not that you can’t find it, and of course you can make it (if you have an oven), but like Japanese pizza, it’s just not the same.

I bought the chocolate パイの実 (painomi) in a fit of nostalgia and delirium, because the picture on the box basically screamed “I’m flakey and filled with chocolate, eat me and be a better person. I’ll also cure cancer, but only if you eat me.” The strawberry version was purchased with a level head, and came out for Japanese strawberry season in November. Both boxes are cute and remind me of vintage printed fabric, but the box is a little large for the number of cookies you actually get.

The chocolate and strawberry cookies look identical and are about an inch across. They are not made out of pie crust, unless you make your pie crust out of puff pastry. Each cookie is flakey and has a little hole where I’m guessing the filling was injected. The flavor of the cookie is the same as puff pastry; buttery, slightly sweet, and simple. I don’t think it’s anything special, but I also don’t think puff pastry by itself is anything noteworthy. The cookie does go stale in about a day if left to the elements, so keep extras sealed. I can only describe both fillings as blah. The chocolate tastes like chocolate, but it’s not rich, it’s not sweet and it’s not creamy. The strawberry was the same waxy consistency but tastes like fake strawberry.

Overall these cookies had nothing to do with pie, and were unremarkable. I did eventually finish both boxes. 2/5

The newest craze in combini-land these days seems to be something called ‘Sparkling.’ You can get Sparkling Tea, Apple Sparkling, and now even Sparkling Strawberry Kit Kat. I haven’t quite figured out what it means, although there always seems to be an over-exuberance of bubbles, so the derivation may be similar to that of sparkling wine. Across the divide from Nestlé’s multiplying Kit Kat brand is Lotte’s fantastic line of Crunky malt puff-infused chocolate, which now comes in 苺のチーズタルト, or Strawberry Cheese Tart. Both have bright pink packaging and juicy-looking stock photography of strawberries, and both are being reviewed today on Pocky Watch.

スパークリングストロベリー [Sparkling Strawberry] Kit Kats come in the same mini-box as many of the other Kit Kat brands I’ve reviewed, containing two packs each holding two long Kit Kat fingers. The packs themselves are Cute with a capital C: pink and red with understated gold rings indicating the bubbly confection inside. It’s worth noting that each pack contains only 99 calories, like the other similarly-sized Kit Kats, making this a mostly guilt-free mid-afternoon snack. The Crunky, meanwhile, comes in a slightly harder to slowly parcel 271 calorie bar, which, after being removed from its sealed foil wrapper, snaps into two squarish pieces of reasonable size. This treat is in the 食後のシアワセ series, which roughly translated means ‘post-meal good fortune;’ a worthy description for any dessert.

The Kit Kats have a strong fake-strawberry smell that really isn’t off-putting, but isn’t terribly appetizing, either. The cookie itself is very much a let-down. The promise of Sparkling is not delivered on except for a very slight bit of fizzing. But after my amazing experience with Meiji’s strawberry chocolate bar, nothing really saves this. If you really, really love strawberry candy, and think the idea of it fizzing on your tongue sounds fun, go for it. Otherwise, I’d steer clear until Nestlé goes back to the drawing board. 2/5

Glico has shown us how it’s done with cheese with their recent release of Chocolat Fromage Dessert Pocky, and Lotte seems to be going in a similar direction, flavoring this bar with cream cheese powder, imitating one of my favorite non-chocolate desserts, the strawberry cheese tart. Where this bar falls down is that tarts rely heavily on the ingredients, and Lotte has (necessarily) cut corners here. The bar is actually not bad, and actually manages to taste quite similar to its real life sister, but I fear the aim may have been a little high. Lotte simply left me wanting the real thing. 3/5

Buy Sparkling Strawberry Kit Kats from napaJapan.

Buy Strawberry Cheese Tart Crunky from napaJapan.

Rainbow Pocky has to be the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. The box is huge. The Pocky are huge. And the packaging looks like it was thrown together in Illustrator in about half an hour. But it’s supposed to catch your eye, and I guess it did, because I bought the box.

So here we are, with seven gigantic sticks of Pocky, each a different color and flavor. All the Pocky are individually packed in colored foil wrapping. There’s banana, orange, grape, blueberry, strawberry, matcha, and to even it out, one with regular milk chocolate. The most massive part of the Pocky are the sticks, which must be twice as long, and several times as thick, as normal Pocky. The flavored chocolate is rather thin, and on many, it’s so thin as to be partially opaque.

The blueberry tastes like a bland Pop-Tart. The banana is awful. I don’t really like normal strawberry Pocky, so I was bound to dislike this, which I do. The cough syrup Pocky, I mean the grape, tasted exactly as I’d expect from a decongestant. The orange is rather strong, but not horrible; kind of like an orange Creamsicle. The matcha tastes like matcha. I dislike matcha flavored things. Let’s move on. The chocolate, at least, tastes as I’d expect (and desire).

Honestly, the best thing that Giant Rainbow Pocky have going for them is the gigantic biscuit. It’s crunchy and satisfying. I couldn’t help but wish that something other than ridiculous fruit flavors were what was paired with it. Giant Men’s Pocky, perhaps? Giant Almond Crunch Pocky? Am I asking too much? Buy only for the true Pocky fanatic in your life. 2/5

A former resident of the eastern United States, and a firm devotee of the cacao bean, I of course have taken the pilgrimage to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to view that chocolatey Mecca. While I was very young at the time, I still remember the Kiss factory, a glorious array of colors of M&Ms, and, like candy Mickey Mouses: walking, picture-posing Hershey’s chocolate bars. To be entirely honest, I may be making that last bit up (I was very young), but the image has stuck with me to this day. Nothing is more American and chocolate than Hershey’s giant milk chocolate bars, and so, since moving to this terrifyingly Hershey-absent country, I’ve been on the lookout for a replacement.

Meiji seems like a possible candidate. One of the biggest candy companies, Meiji produces many of our favorite candies, and with the fairly recent packaging redesign, it seemed time to start covering the chocolate bars. Meiji offers quite a few different flavors, so it will take a few reviews to cover them all. I’ll start with the standard, one of my favorites, and a new addition.

The milk chocolate bar is a beast, and yet still stays below the 100 yen price barrier, making it a tempting impulse buy for a chocoholic.
Inside a nice paper sleeve, Meiji seals the bars in a foil shield, which typically does a great job of protecting the bar, and also reseals easily, if you can manage to not eat the whole thing at once. Unfortunately, the taste is nothing to write home about. At least, nothing to ship out of Japan for. While yummy, and worth picking up in Japan when you want a chocolatey bump, it doesn’t outclass Hershey’s, and certainly not European chocolates. 3/5

I was trepidatious about the strawberry bar, given some other strawberry chocolates I’ve had, but I’ll save you the suspense: I love this bar. The texture and taste is like good strawberry ice cream, down to little (possibly fake) bits of strawberry embedded inside. Unfortunately, the bar is about 75% of the size of the milk chocolate, although at the same price. I don’t know of any bar in America that matches up to this one, and it should definitely make it into your next box from Japan. 5/5

Meiji’s newest bar has the flavor of matcha, which is a traditional Japanese green tea. Matcha is such a part of the culture here that many of my female students go to classes to learn the ancient and complicated process to mix and serve the drink. A couple times a year, I really enjoy a cup. It’s grainy, and a little bitter, but I definately see what the Japanese love about it. However, like the zundamochi Kit Kat, I just don’t think it belongs in a chocolate bar. Which is not to say this is not a loving reproduction of matcha! Rather, it is almost perfect, down to the grainy texture. If you love matcha as much as my students, you will probably also love this bar. And it’s about as ‘Japanese’ as a chocolate bar can get, making it a great gift for any japanophile. I just can’t hardly eat the stuff. 2/5