How the KitKat went global | Financial Times 2021-10-21, 1:32 PM Spring Food & Drink FT Magazine Retail & Consumer industry Show articles How the KitKat went global From wasabi to matcha flavours, Gillian Tett on what the British snack's reinvention in Japan tells us about cultural identities Gillian Tett MARCH 18 2021 In December last year, Nestlé, the Swiss chocolate company based on the scenic shores of Lake Geneva, launched an online advertising campaign in Japan for a "whisky barrel aged" KitKat. Its three layers of wafers were coated with chocolate made from "rare cacao nibs" aged for 180 days in whisky barrels from the island of Islay - "sacred ground" in Scotland for the drink, or so the Japanese marketing literature says. This apparently gave the bar "a refined whisky aroma ... and evokes a calm and relaxed feeling". Does this sound weird or wonderful? Is it a display of culinary creativity by Japanese patissier Yasumasa Takagi, who developed the recipe? Or is it just a sign of the gimmicks that consumer goods companies will use to chase margins? Possibly all of the above. But here is another way to interpret that Scottish-Swiss-Japanese innovation: as a symbol of the paradoxical nature of globalisation today - one that might point to how we consider cultural identities, labels and diversity. We live in an era marked by once-unimaginable levels of global interconnection, ushered in partly by digitisation. That, after all, is the reason chocolate made from cacao aged in Scottish whisky barrels can be advertised so easily to Japanese consumers - and also discovered by me, an English journalist living in New York. Yet as digital platforms, cargo ships and planes create connections (and contagions), we are also living through an anti-globalisation backlash, fuelled by economic pain, geopolitical tensions, populism and insecurity in the face of rapid technological change. Many communities are trying to define their differences - or tribal allegiances - by embracing distinctive cultural signifiers, whether a flag, a language, national dress or a passport. Food can reflect this: hot dogs, say, seem "American"; sushi, "Japanese". But the beauty of what we eat and drink is that it signals an oft-overlooked truth: while national labels can be powerful, they are rarely as fixed as people think. On the contrary, what we feed ourselves with reveals that we live in a world where identities can be wonderfully fluid and ambiguous. In the 20th century, some social scientists fretted that the world was heading for "Cocacolonisation": in which brands such as Coke dominated, crushing local competitors, in an expression of western corporate and political power. But what observers realised subsequently was that this stereotype does not begin to capture what https://www.ft.com/content/7ec44105-c123-4dc8-a262-e5747eae1e1a Page 1 of 10
How the KitKat went global | Financial Times 2021-10-21, 1:32 PM globalisation really does. Yes, cultural memes and objects spread: Coke bottles are found everywhere. But meanings change when they jump borders. Ethnographic research by Nestlé revealed that Japanese teenagers in particular did not like