Toppo – Strawberry Condensed Milk

I’ve reached a point with certain snacks, where I’m either beginning to repeat flavours, or the seasonal limited editions they have are so similar that they might as well be repeats. Toppo doesn’t release that many flavours consistently, at least as far as I’m aware, so the repeats will happen a lot quicker. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re tried and true flavours are just that good, or they don’t see demand for weird flavours. I imagine it has at least some part to do with the dominance of Pocky in general, and Toppo isn’t exactly top of mind for most snackers when it comes to snack sticks with chocolate. I certainly didn’t until I tried it.

This is a seasonal release, and looks to be part of the tourism marketing push to get people to explore more of Japan. This particular campaign seems to be called Enjoy Japan 47. I believe 47 is the prefectures of Japan, and this particular flavour features Kagoshima, Fukui (do they still have T-Rexes over there?!) and Tottori, with an adorable koala mascot riding a camel. That’s both adorable and oddly unsettling. I won’t ruin koalas for you lot, but if you’ve learned what I’ve learned about koalas, I’m fine with adorable cartoon versions over the real thing. Ugh.

It’s hard to explain exactly how these smell different but if I were to try and formulate word combos, I’d say this smells like a very floral but sweet strawberry milk, whereas the normal berry or strawberry flavours smell more like a strawberry pastry. It’s almost like the dairy-ness of the sticks is what separates them. You know, if dairy had a clear and distinct smell. Or maybe it’s just the sugar.

These look to be the regular sticks with about 12 sticks to a pack, with 2 pouches to a box. I’ve talked before about the pros and cons of each, but the gist is that the smaller sticks have a higher ratio of biscuit stick to chocolate, and it’s more like some sort of reverse Pocky, than the big, thicc sticks. While I generally prefer the thicc sticks, the regular sticks are still top notch, and these ones have more emphasis on texture than flavour.

As far as texture goes, I’ve had enough Toppo at this point that I have a general idea of how it goes. Being that these pouches are the smaller stick variety, the chocolate obviously isn’t as thick in the centre, leading to a much snappier…well, snap. The ratio is more about the biscuit pretzel than the chocolate filling, and both formats have their pros and cons. This one is less emphasis on the filling, but more on the lovely pretzel stick. I’m starting to find I lean more towards the thicker sticks, but these are good in their own right. I find it will come down to preference in the end.

At this point I’ve had plenty of berry flavours, and I can say that these are similar, but not the same. While it does have that strawberry, floral flavour that I’ve come to know and love, the addition of the condense milk gives it a bit more of a smooth, sweeter finish. While the usually strawberry flavour has more of a tart finish, this one is simply a nice smooth sweet dairy ending. I can’t say I prefer one style over the other, because I enjoy them both.

Unless you had them side by side though, I’d say these are close enough to the standard strawberry flavour that even once this rotates out and you are craving a thick, substantial pretzel with chocolate strawberry filling, the regular Toppo is just as good.