Kit Kat – Pops

The Kit Kat is an ubiquitous candy bar. That doesn’t necessarily make it good, mind you. I’ll probably ruffle quite a few feathers if I say that I don’t get all the hype around it. While I do appreciate how creative and frankly successful the brand has become in Japan, it has resulted in a situation where I find the western and North American versions to be…boring and bland in comparison. Maybe ignorance is bliss, and if I hadn’t discovered the Japanese ones so early on, I might be content with what we get here.

The premise is quite simple – take the experience of a classic Kit Kat and condense it into tiny mini balls. The benefit is that they are easier to share, easier to eat and don’t leave as much of a mess. I mean, that alone is attractive enough of a marketing point to get me to try it, so surely it will appeal to others as well.

The texture is like taking a solid small sphere of chocolate and inserting a square wafer in it. It does what it advertises, but in execution it leaves a bit to be desired, mostly because the ratio of chocolate to wafer is a bit whack depending on where you are biting it. In some parts it’s fine, but in some parts the ratio of chocolate is too high, and it lacks that light counter play between solid chocolate and wafer that keeps it feeling heavy. Something that the Coffee Crisp Pops did that alleviated that was to add some bits of popped rice into the chocolate as well, which would have definitely made this much better.

The flavour is identical to a normal Kit Kat bar, in that the chocolate is very similar, and the wafer on the inside is mostly for texture rather than flavour. If this was a more unique or interesting flavour I would enjoy it, but as it stands it’s really just your standard milk chocolate affair with some wafer on the inside.

While I wasn’t head over heels for the Coffee Crisp Pops, I did enjoy them enough to consider getting them again in certain situations. Having said that though, these are honestly quite underwhelming. It’s the same concept, but unlike the interesting combination of flavours and textures, this is just chocolate and wafer. Not really my thing, but I’m sure a lot of people enjoy it.Given my thoughts on the regular, classic Kit Kat bar, I think it’s pretty self-evident that changing the format to a ball was not going to impress me. I guess this was a failed romance from the beginning, given that it had so much working against it going into this.

I do want to be clear though, if you enjoy Kit Kat, there’s a good chance you will enjoy this too. Just keep in mind that if you find the classic Kit Kat to be the perfect ratio of wafer to chocolate, this will throw that ratio off in favour of chocolate. I can’t say whether that would be a good thing for you or not, but I can say that it’s different, and I’m sure somewhere someone will enjoy that. It’s up to market forces on whether there’s enough of those people to keep this product alive.