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Pocky
Chocolate-coated Biscuit Sticks by Ezaki Glico
Date:07, Feb, 2019
Investigated and Written by Misaka Youhei
About our introductory articles


Hello, everyone. I'm so happy to see you here with me now. Today I'm talking about Pocky produced by Ezaki Glico, a global company. Have you ever had it?


What's Pocky? It's a pack of several chocolate-coated biscuit sticks. Ezaki Glico first developed and launched it in 1966.

In 2019 today, I heard that most Japanese people tended to keep snacks at a distance. Why? Japan's snacks suddenly became unappetising? Somehow most of Japanese manufacturers got to suffer from idiocy? No, no, no. Now as you know, most people have smartphones like iPhone. They have to keep their fingers clean for touch screens, then. Having snacks makes their fingers kind of stained. So they got to keep snacks at a distance, and Japanese snack manufactures have groped in the dark.

That's not a present matter. In 1966 when Ezaki Glico developed Pocky, that was also a trouble to snack manufacturers.


What does it mean? At first, Ezaki Glico tried to produce biscuit sticks coated with chocolate completely. But it was not allowed because it would doubtlessly make the eaters' fingers stained. "Why not coat each stick with silver paper?" "It makes Pocky higher at price. Who'll buy?" Day by day they'd been at their wits end.

One day, one of them hit upon a good idea by taking a look at Kushi-katsu, a specialty of Osaka. It kept the eaters' fingers clean because of the sticks. So why not leave a part of the Pocky sticks not coated with chocolate? Eureka! Then, Pocky were born in 1966.



Kushi-katsu in "Daruma," Osaka
File: KushikatsuDaruma01.jpg
from the Japanese Wikipedia
(Photed on Jan. 7, 2015)

Today, Pocky have a lot of variations as mousse, green tea, honey, strawberry, cookies and cream, and coconut-flavored coatings.


Why did they name it Pocky? It was from a Japanese onomatopoetic word "Pokkin." It sounds so to Japanese people when a stick is broken into two.


Glico Official Site




 

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