Cratz – Grilled Corn

Cratz, unlike the other Glico brands like Pocky and Pretz are perfectly fine with resting on their laurels, only releasing a few flavours and sticking to the tried and true. That’s not a bad thing, as they have a formula and it has clearly been working for them. What it means though, is that I tend to have a lot less new things to review from them, and often end up just eating the same old flavours. That’s why when they do release a new flavour, whether it’s limited or not, I jump on that like a mosquito on a nice plump ounce of exposed skin.

This flavour comes in a nice golden shiny foil package, contrasting the typical matte black one. I feel a little fancier just holding this pack. If nothing else, this packaging has sold me.

The flavour of these is like that of a a sweet corn snack or a sweet cream of corn soup. As far as this flavour goes, for Japanese snacks if you’ve had one sweet corn flavour you will probably be able to figure out how all the others taste. Sure there’s a bit of variation here and there, but ultimately they all taste fairly similar and if you’ve tried one, you’ve basically tried them all.

Unlike the other Cratz flavours that rely on seasoning alone to give flavour to the pieces, this one seems to have it baked into the pretzel itself, as the seasoning is fairly mild in comparison to other flavours. A lot of the flavour comes from the sweet, corn pretzel. I’m not sure if they used some sort of corn or powder in the pretzel, but it sure does seem like it given the flavour and colour. My guess is the powder alone wouldn’t be enough to carry the flavour through all the way.

The texture is no different from other Cratz flavours. The one difference I can see is that while the traditional Cratz is like a pretzel and has a “skin” or brown, harder outer shell to it, this one is the same throughout and doesn’t have any skin or distinguishable layer to it. Again, I’m guessing this is probably due to the ingredients that went into this to get the corn flavour into the pretzel itself. Texture wise there’s not much difference.

The whole experience comes together to remind me a lot of the grilled corn flavoured Pretz I had as a kid. Except you know, these are tiny, super dense and come with a few almonds here and there. The adult’s Pretz, if you will. Not that adults can’t have Pretz. Or so I hope not…

I love Cratz in general, and this does not disappoint. Because of it’s lower reliance on seasoning, this isn’t nearly as salty as the standard flavours. At least, it doesn’t feel that way so while you could still pair this with a beer or a cold drink, it’s not as necessary as the other flavours. I like this. I like this a lot. I would get this again, and you should too.