KitKat Mango Purin

The makers seem to have started hedging their bets with recent new flavours.

Multibags’ contents are now often 50/50 – half are regular milk chocolate ordinary KitKat, the other half being the more outlandish flavour.

This is probably a good marketing ploy – I’d imagine consumers are less likely to want to buy a whole bag of a peculiar flavour if they think they might get stuck with handfuls of sweets they’re not going to eat.  But with half the bag being the pure, unadulterated original, the risk is instantly halved.  They’re evidently not all nutters at Nestlé Japan.

And after the dreadful summer that it’s been for KitKats, Mango Purin is not bad by comparison.

KitKat Mango

Special omiyage edition only available in Kyushu and Okinawa. You’d have to be a real mango lover, but the whole package is so suggestively exotic, you’d want it anyway.

KitKat Exotic Kyushu Sakura

Or Exotic Sakura Assort, to give it its proper title. Each of the four regions now has a Sakura version of the Exotic collection, meaning half the box contains the “caramel white chocolate with orange and mango” that dissolved my teeth before, and the other half is those delicate pink cherry-flavoured ones.

All rather excessive, if you ask me. I’m not quite sure what the idea is behind this version, but when it comes to entirely unsuitable and random flavour combinations that leave us wanting less, it’s what we’ve come to expect from anything with Takagi’s name on it.

KitKat Exotic Kyushu

This KitKat reminds me of a celebrity. Not a particular celebrity, but a type. The type that comes from a down-to-earth, humble background, goes on to worldwide fame and fortune and in the process goes irretrievably barking mad.

So immediately you detect the hand of nutter gourmet Takagi. And here he extends his ‘Exotic’ series to us oft-neglected southerners with “caramel white chocolate with orange and mango”. A bit like when a child comes in from the garden and offers you a mud pie made with real mud, it catches you unawares, you smile and say thank you very much. Well, not much like that actually, because these are really rather edible, though they’ll test even the sweetest tooth.