Japanese Kit Kat Bars Are Getting Smaller

There are American Kit Kats, which everyone saves until they've finished all of the Reese's Cups in their Hershey's Halloween assortment, and then there are Japanese Kit Kats, which are on another level entirely. There have been more than 400 different flavors of the wafer-filled chocolate bars, everything from matcha and sake, to apple, banana, and an Ocean Salt version made with real sea salt from the Seto Inland Sea.

"The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper," the New York Times gushed. "Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world [...] All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status."

But Kit Kat seems to have made a rare misstep, disappointing its Japanese fans and lowkey blaming them for the company's own decision. The mini Kit Kat is the most popular version in the country—the Times reports that around 4 million of them are sold every day—but those already undersized minis have gotten smaller lately.

A Twitter user recently noticed that Kit Kats Minis are now significantly smaller than they used to be. In addition to just looking tinier, the scale proves it: the old mini weighed in at 12 grams, while the updated version was 10 grams, a decrease of 17 percent.

According to SoraNews24, Nestle confirmed the 'shrinkflation' in a statement. (Nestle produces Kit Kats in every country except the United States; in the States, the Hershey Company has licensed the rights to Kit Kat from Nestle). Anyway, Nestle said that it had received customer feedback suggesting that “the conventional product size may be too large," which provided part of their motivation to make the Minis even smaller.

"For some time, many consumers have said they are concerned about calories and want to hold back on their sugar intake," the company said. "From September 2020, we adjusted the recipe to switch part of the sugar to soy milk okara powder etc., and changed each serving to be bite-sized so that people concerned about calories can easily enjoy it. In the case of the standard ‘KitKat Mini’, the weight was reduced from 11.6 grams to 9.9 grams.”

It's hard to imagine that literally anyone ever said "Help, my chocolate bar is too big," so even though Nestle admitted that the candies are smaller, fand might suspect they're fudging—for lack of a better word—that explanation.

Break me off a tiny corner of that Kit Kat bar, I guess.