How many kit kats are made a year

If you purchase something through our links, we may earn a commission. Pricing and availability are accurate as of publish time. Kit Kat lovers, prepare to have your minds blown: that creamy filling between the crispy wafers of the classic chocolate bar isn't just plain chocolate.

There's definitely some chocolate in there, but a BBC documentary revealed that the inside layers of the bar are actually made of Thinking about that is sure to unleash some chicken-and-egg confusion: What, then, were the creamy layers of the original Kit Kat bar made from? The documentary originally aired during a episode of BBC Two's "Inside the Factory," but the ground-up Kit Kat business came to light recently during a re-run of the episode, when a fan tweeted, "Wait, the filling is ground-up Kit Kat?

Almost everything changes, but the wafers? The wafers never change. The wafers have a fixed standard that needs to be maintained, and deviations are not acceptable.

Standing beneath the fresh, moving wafers, I asked Iwai if I could hold one, as if it were a newborn, and I did not expect him to let me. But he reached into the line and pulled one out, passing it toward me with two hands. All I knew was that the wafer was huge, golden, marked with square cups and totally weightless.

That if this was the soul of a Kit Kat, then holding the soul of a Kit Kat was like holding nothing at all. Kikyouya, originally a small, family-run sweet shop that specialized in kintsuba , a Japanese sweet filled with red-bean paste, has been making shingen mochi since the late s. Before I knew this, I ate shingen mochi in my hotel room, as Tokyo was being soaked by the outermost edges of a passing typhoon. With my first bite, I sent a little cloud of roasted soybean powder into the air and coughed with surprise.

The rice cakes were soft, chewy, delicious. And where the brown-sugar syrup trapped the powder, it turned into a gorgeous caramel sludge. Tomoko Ohashi was the lead developer on the Kikyou shingen mochi Kit Kat.

It was more like a real pastry kitchen, full of dehydrated fruit powders and matcha organized in tubs, chocolate molds and serrated knives and a marble counter for tempering chocolate. The challenge with shingen mochi, Ohashi said, was finding the balance between the soybean powder and the syrup.

Because the sweet is so adaptable, everyone who eats it calibrates it obsessively, adjusting the ingredients so it tastes the way they like. Ohashi started work on the new flavor last September, and she finished it in May.

In tests, she would make about 50 pieces of four to five different versions by hand, tempering chocolate on the marble table, and then taste them side by side, looking for the right balance of soybean powder to sugar syrup.

Did the sticky rice in the Kit Kat help to mimic the mochi texture? After all the testing, Ohashi concentrated all the flavorings in the cream filling: the sticky rice as well as soybean powder and brown-sugar syrup.

The bars went on sale on Oct. Standing in the test kitchen, I unwrapped the new flavored Kit Kat and broke into it with a crack. The bar was a mini, two tiny connected ingots.

On my way, I stopped for lunch at a small noodle restaurant and sat by the window, eating a pile of salted plums. I could see busloads of tourists filing out in the parking lot, their floppy hats secured with strings, their shirts wet with sweat.

They were fruit hunters. Yamanashi is green, dense with red pine and white oak forest and beautifully kept orchards that cut deep into its slopes. Fruit hunters pay to eat as much ripe, seasonal fruit as they like in a short span of time. Say, 30 minutes of thin-skinned peaches, or fat pink grapes, or strawberries, warmed from the sun, dipped into pools of sweetened condensed milk.

Fruit hunters travel to eat the fruit on site, right off the trees, in their allotted time. When the concept was explained to me, I thought the time limit seemed embarrassing. It was practical, it was beautiful and it acknowledged that souvenirs were, like memories, at best only approximations of the moments they represented.

That it was, in fact, completely impossible to remove a taste from its origin without changing it in the process. The Kikyou shingen mochi Kit Kat was smooth to the touch, shiny. It had a brilliant, crumbless snap, which gave way to a pure white chocolate and caramel flavor and a lightly savory note.

It was sweet, it was good. It was in balance. And it recalled fresh Kikyou shingen mochi, vaguely, like a memory gone soft around the edges.

She has won two James Beard Foundation awards for restaurant criticism. Not the boutiques or cosmetics counters, no duty-free sunglasses and designer perfumes for me. No, the pressing calculus as I make my way to baggage claim is driven by drugstores, kiosks, supermarkets and vending machines.

As with breakfast foods, I believe candy is often tastier the less expensive it is. I like my confections approachable. Shot through with a skosh of hoi polloi-ishness. Wrappers with cartoon mascots are promising. So is branding that testifies to soccer hooliganism as a respectable pastime. If a wan man in a toque has ever loomed over the thing with tweezers, no matter how storied its provenance, I would enjoy its bootleg cousin more.

Russian bulk-candy bins are feasts for the eyes, with trillions of variations on the individually wrapped chocolate bonbon. The art direction on each tiny canvas is a marvel, featuring oil-painted landscapes, shiny-eyed squirrels, polar bears and swans — even the occasional camel. The thumb-size rectangular one, featuring a startled-looking infant in a babushka, is my favorite. British Smarties beat American Smarties, because candy-coated chocolate buttons are superior to chalky pressed pills; of the former, the orange taste delicious.

Any flavor of Ritter Sport is crucial whenever you can find one milk-chocolate cornflake in particular. The green Haribo gummy frog is peach not apple common misconception ; clear gummy bears are the best bears. Hi-Chews lay waste to any other fruit taffy experience. Milkita melon is a singular delight — creamy honeydew drops — while Kasugai gummies in mango, muscat grape, lychee and yuzu in that order are a necessary part of any convenience-store run in Tokyo.

When it comes to the United States, my opinions are more calcified. Red Vines over Twizzlers. Hands down. Milk chocolate over dark; white is not right, and the only correct way to eat a Kit Kat is to nibble off the enrobed edges and pry the wafer layers apart. Fight me. Candy is controversial. As with a beloved sports team, your affinities and fealties have been ingrained since your prelinguistic days.

Such innate belief systems defy reasoning. How else could you explain how Circus Peanuts are still a going concern? Or those gnarly monstrous mint-leaf gel slices, the dial-up internet of candy? But no matter your brand, it will always deliver similar things: the rose-tinted pleasure of nostalgia, a brief respite from adulthood and, well, whatever else it is that sugar does for morale.

Despite all our differences, candy speaks to a fundamentally shared humanity; we like a lot of the same stuff.

Most of us have some version of Fun Dip. Or Pop Rocks. Fruit leather. Bodegas, newsstands, dagashiyas and tuck shops rarely require selfie sticks. That in and of itself should inspire fondness and warmth.

As a Korean kid who grew up in a former British colony, I might not ever be able to go home. Mary H. As she passed out paper bowls, Beth Kimmerle smiled broadly at the dozen or so employees of Long Grove Confectionery Company seated around the conference table.

Each bowl contained a slightly misshapen caramel of unknown origin. What do you notice about its appearance? She turned to a graphic designer.

It was, in fact, caramel-colored, but Kimmerle, a year-old native Chicagoan who has written four books on candy and helps companies develop new recipes, was after something more specific. Other suggestions included buttery, burnt, caramel — language that Kimmerle approved. Now she was ready to move on to flavor. She told everyone to write down any words that came to mind, whether they were one of the five basic tastes or any of the trillions of aromas the nose can detect.

Everything else is a texture or an aroma, a volatile, airborne scent. The folks at Long Grove were tasting the candy, but now their task was to describe its flavor, which exists at the intersection of taste, aroma and even feeling like the burning heat of a chile or the icy chill of menthol.

Confusion radiated from their faces. The tasters began taking tiny bites and closing their eyes, chewing intently and rolling the caramel around on their tongues. Just swish with water and try again. Someone let out an audible sound of delight. Everyone in the room laughed uncomfortably. Yet it did make a certain amount of sense. As children, we learn the names of all sorts of shapes, colors and sounds. But when it comes to the way things smell or taste, the only language we ever hear is qualitative — good and bad, yummy and yucky, delicious and disgusting.

And in adulthood, we learn that taking the time to describe the things we eat and drink is the pretentious domain of foodies and wine snobs going on and on about flavor profiles and horse-sweat bouquets. Once you start trying, you notice how difficult it is to assign language to taste and smell. The sense of taste is simultaneously public, because we come together to eat; and private, because we must put food inside our bodies in order to taste it.

This paradox creates tension. Your experience of flavor is unique and unspoken; the mere act of describing it entails exposing something incredibly intimate. What if you share a bar of chocolate with a loved one and describe how it tastes, only to discover your companion disagrees? I struggled to assign her much credibility. I learned to taste from chefs who trained in the finest restaurants in France and Italy. Kimmerle received her Sensory Expert certification after taking an online course from the Institute of Food Technologists.

Could she really know more about how to taste than I did? It makes sense that, within an industrial setting, the primary value of sensory evaluation is consistency. But why should nonprofessional tasters care about slowing down to describe the experience of eating candy? Come back and tell me about it tomorrow.

They just drink and eat. So they learn, and they learn to appreciate. The point of candy is joy — pure, unadulterated joy. In fact, matters of taste are highly personal, and often colored by past experience. Both genetics and childhood exposure shape our earliest culinary preferences. And for adults, nostalgia — a literal longing for home — can also affect the flavors toward which we orient ourselves.

Practically all I do professionally, in either capacity, is describe the experience of preparing and eating food. I tend to rely on metaphor — fireworks in my mouth! But sort of like my therapist does, Kimmerle, who was mentored by Fossum, had me set aside what I thought and narrow in on what I felt. The sensory practice became almost meditative, offering me an entirely new way to experience taste. I wanted to keep practicing. The next day, Kimmerle suggested we try more varied sweets.

We headed out on a tour of international markets near her home north of Chicago. Twenty-five years later, I still had no idea what it might possibly taste like. We sorted through everything and decided on a tasting order. Just as in a wine or cheese tasting, we wanted to save the strongest-flavored candies until the end to keep our palates from being overwhelmed. We agreed that the aflatoon , probably on the milder side, was a good place to begin.

First, we noted the appearance: a speckled slice the color of brown sugar. Next, we sniffed. Like brown fruit? Or baked notes? Was she posturing? Even once we had tasted the aflatoon , I felt at a loss for words.

It could be wheat flour, or almonds. And I still really get the brown fruit. It could be date, date syrup. We tasted the aflatoon again. I took another bite, this time noticing a gritty texture and the slightest tang as the aflatoon melted away. I started to feel impatient. It tasted like pure citric acid and salt. I looked at the ingredients, surprised to find sugar and a host of artificial colors listed. Neither of us could have identified the presence of either until I rolled another pinch of the powder around on my tongue, searching for a grain of sugar.

Each taste was so unbelievably salty that it made me wince with something between discomfort and pain. Yet my mouth kept watering. Or smiling. Eventually it was time for Pelon Pelo Rico. Pushing up on the base of the tube made the paste move through the holes at the top like noodles. The paste was glossy and brownish-red.

We agreed that it smelled like some sort of fruit leather and tasted sweet, salty, with tamarind and chile and a little grit to the texture. She was right — every single taste bud in my mouth was firing simultaneously. The sensation was utterly delightful. As we made our way through the massive pile of candy, I started to feel more confident about my ability to notice nuances.

It hasn't been as swift to adopt new Kit Kat flavors for the American market as Nestle has for places overseas. However, last summer, Hershey marketed a strawberry Kit Kat bar , as part of a limited-edition "Flavors of America" series.

There also has been a Red Velvet Kit Kat, and you can buy white and dark chocolate ones. So, who knows? With the new manufacturing capacity in Pennsylvania, maybe there will be an American green tea Kit Kat.

Or maybe the dark chocolate and green tea that's available in Japan. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. What is the oldest candy bar? Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Year Created: Oh Henry! Clark Bar. Fry's Turkish Delight. Cadbury Dairy Milk. Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar. Lindt Chocolate Bar. Kalid Heiligers Pundit. Igor Mateew Teacher. What's the number one selling candy in the world? Snickers is not only best - selling candy bar in the U.

The Snickers bar, made byMars Inc. Dositeo Wyart Supporter. What flavor is the pink KitKat? Barry Callebaut has kept the production methods used tocreate ruby chocolate a secret. This has led some to believe thatthe cacao processor has utilised unfermented cocoa, as raw cocoabeans are naturally slightly pink in colour. Emy Bechert Supporter. Are Japanese Kit Kats vegetarian?