Japanese KitKat flavours

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The week before our trip to Japan we watched this Buzzfeed video and couldn't wait to try all 200 KitKat flavours (we had 10 weeks and 3 flavours a day seems pretty reasonable, right?).

But it's actually not that easy, you can't just walk into a 7/11 and buy them all. Lots of the flavours are special editions specific to seasons or regions, so they're pretty hard to track down. We ended up trying about 15 in the end.

The best place to buy them is Narita airport. Other places we had luck were discount stores in busy areas (like Harajuku and Shinjuku) and souvenir stores in smaller towns (check out Tokyo Cheapo's guide for more ideas). Tokyo even has its own KitKat shop in Ikebukuto, where the they come in little presentation boxes – fancy!

Tokyo Chocolatory

Ginger KitKats in a presentation box

So, on to the flavours. If we're being totally honest, yes a lot of these KitKats do taste pretty artificial. Some are great (green tea, chilli, ginger) and others, not so much (hi there, Shinzu apple flavour).

Some of the KitKats we tried

Some more!

My favourite was the bakeable lemon cheesecake flavour, which is easy to find in most convenience stores. They come out of the packet looking like this:

Bakeable KitKats

And then after a few seconds under the grill they turn into this:

Cheesecake KitKats

And somehow they actually taste of lemon cheesecake!

For more on Japanese food, check out my Japanese food guide, and posts on where to eat in Tokyo and Kyoto.