Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate - Famous Korean Chocolate Maker Jumps on the Salted Caramel Bandwagon!!!

Ok, the first thing that annoys me about this product is that the rubbish quality screengrab from our own video is the best picture I can find of it on the whole internet - in fact it is the only picture! The second thing that annoys me about this product is that it sucks. I mean it really sucks. It's worse than the rubbish picture above. It tastes terrible, the texture is terrible, the consistency is terrible, basically it's just a terrible product.

Credit to Lotte for being ahead of the curve by a few years with the whole Salt and Caramel in everything trend (you can see from our reactions to the salt component that this was something very new and unlikely to be good sounding to us), but the product is just incredibly poorly executed.

Now I want to balance this review by stating clearly that Lotte are a great company with a long history and a tonne of great chocolate products and snack products. They were established in Japan in 1948 and South Korea in 1967 and have been going strong since then. It is unfortunate that the second product we reviewed from them was so bad! They do have a whole range of other unusual chocolate bars under their specialité such as:

Lotte Specialité Rum Cake Chocolate

Lotte Specialité Marron Glacé Chocolate

But sadly I've tried none of them and none of them seem to be available in Hong Kong anymore, so I'll never be able to find out if they were any good or not. I hope we'll be able to review Lotte's standout product "Koala no March" sometime in the future. In the meantime here is the review of the Lotte Specialité Salt and Caramel Chocolate:

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong! 
And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog

Meiji Hokkaido Cheese Chocolate - Instead of Milk Chocolate they Made This Stuff With Stinky Cheese!!!

Ok, I don't think it's going to be giving the game away by letting you know that this product was disgusting... I mean was anybody ever expecting a cheese flavoured chocolate to be good? And let's go one step further, if I understand correctly this is not just a cheese flavoured chocolate, this is a chocolate where the milk is replaced by cheese in the production process! To make matters worse the cheese they use appears to be a strong, stinky, brie type cheese of the more pungent variety. This is just not a good combination. Heck this is not even a good idea. Whoever came up with this was a nut job. What's perhaps even more shocking is that this product has now been around for years and people are still stupid enough to buy it... Maybe once as a shock / novelty item, but if you have common sense or taste buds for that matter, then you will not be silly enough to punish yourself with it a second time.

Surprisingly this product is made by the long-standing and very famous Japanese confectionary and chocolate company Meiji Seika (usually known as Meiji for short). 90% of their products usually range from good to excellent and very few are even below average, but this one is really on a different tangent. At the risk of getting sued I'm going to imply that perhaps the creative team were on drugs when they invented this one.

The cheese they use in the chocolate comes from Hokkaido, the second largest Island in Japan and one of the cleanest and most beautiful places on the planet. Since Meiji own dairies (Meiji Dairies) I assume that this cheese is produced fresh by them on Hokkaido, before they make the stupid move of blending it into their usually delicious chocolate.

And if you think this is the end of the story, think again, coz they have another unwise cheese chocolate product, the Meiji Hokkaido Premium White Cheese Chocolate made with what appears to be a Chaumes / Port Salut / Brebis type of cheese. I have unfortunately or fortunately not been able to acquire this product yet, but you can check it out here:

Well as you can probably guess from what I'm writing here, this entire experience has rather confused and distressed me. To see the exact reaction I had when trying the product, check out our Crazy from Kong review here: 

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!

And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog

Meiji Meltykiss - One of the Most Famous Chocolates in Japan Really Melts in Your Mouth not in Your Hand!!!

Meltykiss is a very famous chocolate across Japan created in 1993 by legendary Japanese confectionary and pharmaceutical company Meiji Seika which in turn was founded way back in 1916. The reason it is called Meltykiss is because it genuinely does seem to melt away in your mouth once you start eating it (like a kiss?). They come in many different flavours such as the regular chocolate, strawberry and green tea (pictured above) as well as ones like caramel, dark rum and meltykiss white chocolate. What is even more interesting about Meltykiss is that they are a "Winter Premium" product - meaning that they only hit the shelves in stores when it starts getting towards sweater wearing weather. The reason for this is very simple, those melt-in-your-mouth goodies would quickly become melt-on-the-shelf goodies if sold during the hotter summer months. 

Another thing they are famous for is their TV ads of which they have many, often featuring famous Japanese actresses like Aizawa Sayo (相沢 紗世). You can check out some of the popular ones here: 

and here: 

Well now you know a bit of background about this unique Japanese Chocolate, to see what we thought about Meiji Meltykiss - Strawberry flavour, check out our review below:

Check out all our reviews of bizarre Asian snacks, foods and drinks here: Crazy from Kong!

And you can check out my blog here: Spencer Douglass Blog