How exciting! The Phileas Fogg snack line has been relaunched. The offerings seem a bit more pedestrian this time around, though -- too many tortilla chips for my taste, though one does have poppy seeds, which is certainly not the norm.
In other snack news, we'd noticed recently that the shelves of our local convenience store had been positively overflowing with various "limited edition" versions of chocolate bars and other sweets. It seems that business reporters have noticed the same thing, as there were pieces about the phenomenon in both the New York Times magazine and the Wall Street Journal this weekend. The WSJ article goes into more detail, particularly on the basic failure of the gambit for KitKat in the UK.
According to the article, the flood of new flavors was the brainchild of a fancy Australian executive.
Over the course of the next year [2004], the company rolled out a dizzying array of new KitKats. For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came "Christmas pudding" and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone. Even though Britons never fully embraced the Atkins diet craze, the company launched a low-carb version.
This sort of thing goes over very well in Japan, I believe -- they've got a zillion more KitKat flavors, much like the multitude of Pockys (Pockies?) -- but not so much in the British Isles, apparently:
Colin Snead, a 24-year-old Londoner, has been a fan of KitKats since he was a kid, often stocking up on them so he can eat one with his afternoon tea. Curious about the new flavors, he tried the new strawberries-and-cream variant last year. "It was a bit sickly and sweet," he says. "It wasn't what I wanted from a KitKat. That was it for me. I noticed the red berry flavor, but after that strawberry one, I stuck with the normal KitKat."
Of course the real thing worth noting here is the name Colin Snead. Colin, how did you find your way out of the pages of Dickens and into the Wall Street Journal? And shouldn't you be a bit more grateful for the bounteous chocolate riches of the twenty-first century? In any case, we here are actually more into Ritter Sport, lately. (Oh no! We've embraced the treacherous Hun!) The Rum Raisin is a particular favorite: VERY rummy indeed.
I like the marzipan Ritter Sport a lot, too, although I'm a bit marzipanned out lately.
Posted by: Steve | 01/09/2007 at 07:34 AM