Toppo – Corn Chocolate

Every so often it seems corn hits the spotlight in the confectionery and chocolate world. Not that it was every fully out of it, but every once in a while it blows up in a big way. It seems corn has become vogue again in the past year or so, and I’m not sure why. Maybe people just forgot about how weird it was the first couple of times. Sort of like the McRib.

Something I noticed about this is that this is in collaboration with Calbee. I can only assume that Calbee has some sort of corn based snack and this collaboration is to celebrate or promote them. I have no real idea honestly.

As expected, these smell like sweet corn. They sort of remind me of sugary corn cereal without the maple syrup. Like corn pops. I personally love corn in all it’s shapes and forms – whether it’s in a savoury dish or snack, like corn chips, corn on the cob, or in sweet capacity like the aforementioned cereal. I can’t think of any corn desserts off the top of my head right now, but I’m sure I would gel just fine with those too.

These are the thinner sticks, so there’s about 12 or so sticks of the thinner variety. I waver at times between whether I prefer the thicc sticks or the normal thinner ones, and today I’m kind of feeling the thicc ones. Not that I’m going to hold that against them.

The flavour is the sweet corn that is honestly very common and at this point feels a bit generic. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lot of these, but it’s basically exactly what I expected, which is neither a good nor bad thing. The corn chocolate flavour works well with the flavour of the biscuit. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the the sweet corn Pretz flavour I loved as a kid, except there’s no salt or seasoning to add a savoury quality to it.

Texture isn’t different from the other Toppo’s I’ve tried. They are very snappy on the outside like a biscuit, while the inside is soft chocolate that breaks apart easily along with the sticks. The one thing I will say is that these are my favourite brand of biscuit sticks because they just get me in terms of the mouthfeel. My only regret is that I discovered these so late in life. Or maybe that’s a good thing…

While this piece works, I think it could be better. Or rather, it works better if there’s savoury or salty elements to it, as that’s what a good quality sweet corn is about – that interplay between sweet and savoury. I still like these, but I’d probably prefer to get sweet corn Pretz or just grab another flavour of Toppo instead. If someone offered this to me, I wouldn’t say no, but I wouldn’t buy this unless I was gifting it to someone or they really liked corn flavoured chocolate.