[HN Gopher] The hijacking of $339k worth of rare Japanese KitKats
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The hijacking of $339k worth of rare Japanese KitKats
Author : janpio
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-11-10 21:30 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.straitstimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.straitstimes.com)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn't kit kat
| just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal
| with the boner these companies have about withholding certain
| flavors in certain markets?
| abhorrence wrote:
| Presumably in this case it has something to do with how Hershey
| owns the rights for Kit-Kat in the USA, but Nestle everywhere
| (at least as far as I know) else.
| georgel wrote:
| The manufacturers likely don't want to deal with additional
| SKUs and logistics for what is a low volume item in those
| regions. Allergies/ingredient disclosure might present
| challenges as well.
| busterarm wrote:
| Because it's two different companies.
|
| KitKat around the world is Nestle. KitKat in the US is under
| license to Hershey. Licensing is expensive.
| twic wrote:
| It's Nestle in the UK, and they don't sell the Japanese bonus
| snacks here either.
| projektfu wrote:
| License it to Mondelez and suddenly it will have lots of
| flavors you won't likely buy....
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| KitKat are already full of wafer so Mondelez wouldn't be
| motivated to 'put anything in the chocolate bar at all so
| long as it's not chocolate'. What's cheaper than wafer? I
| guess if they can make more of the inside wafer, so
| there's less chocolate coating?
|
| Perhaps you can make wafer bubbly, so it's more air?
| Although it's cheaper to just put it in a plastic wrapper
| and fill the wrapper with nitrogen...
| busterarm wrote:
| It's also hard to understand just how popular KitKats are
| in Japan and how their products and limited time offers
| cater uniquely to the Japanese audience.
|
| KitKat has a lot of competition in the UK where caramels
| are way more popular than weird KK flavors.
| dharmab wrote:
| Japanese retail space (as in, the physical space available in
| the stores) favors small batches. US retail space favors
| economies of scale.
| lbotos wrote:
| KitKat in the USA is run by Hershey.
|
| KitKat globally is run by Nestle.
|
| That's one reason why.
|
| The second is that in Japan Kit Kat sounds like "good luck"
| which is why they became popular, and two, why we see such
| regional variation.
|
| (I have 4 Japanese flavors in my NYC fridge right now -- Sweet
| Potato, Adult Sweetness, Wheat, and Caramel Pudding (which you
| bake!)
| robotnikman wrote:
| I just ended up ordering some myself after finding out about
| these lol.
|
| Another perk I've found about treats from overseas is they
| use actual sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.
| SECProto wrote:
| sugar instead of HFCS, cocoa butter instead of palm oil.
| There's definitely better quality in some markets and
| products than others
| reactordev wrote:
| except they use palm oil in the caramel pudding recipe.
|
| >"Ingredients: Chocolate (Sugar, Lactose, Vegetable
| Oil(palm)whole milk powder, cocoa butter), wheat flour,
| vegetable oil, lactose, sugar, caramel powder (skim milk,
| concentrated milk), yeast extract, cocoa powder, whole
| milk powder, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, emulsifier(lethal,
| sucrose fatty acid ester, glycerin fatty acid ester),
| sodium bicarbonate, flavor, yeast extract,(contains
| wheat, milk, soybeans)"
| reactordev wrote:
| That's pretty much true of most overseas candies and
| chocolates. Some of the best chocolates from Europe use
| cocoa butter and real sugar. Not Processed Cocoa Powder,
| HFCS, additives, colorings, preservatives, and then
| tempered with plastic.
| electriclove wrote:
| Where did you order from?
| zerocrates wrote:
| For chocolate bars and stuff like KitKats I can't think
| that I've hardly ever seen them use HFCS instead of sugar.
| Maybe in ones with a more liquid component. Like, I'm
| pretty sure even the lowly standard Hershey bar uses sugar.
| karlshea wrote:
| > Caramel Pudding (which you bake!)
|
| Oh my god I have some of these I should have looked at the
| back of the package more closely!
| lbotos wrote:
| I'm a cooking nerd so I have a torch which I find works
| better than the oven and toasting them does actually make
| them better!!
| lynguist wrote:
| I hadn't heard about this origin story of Japanese KitKat
| before and looked it up.
|
| Kitto katsu! means "you will surely win" or "you will surely
| succeed".
|
| So it is given as tokens for success in exams and the like.
|
| Katsu for winning/succeeding also can be seen in Tonkatsu =
| pork cutlet (katsu is the Japanese "shortening" of cutlet),
| which is also offered as a success token.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| It certainly seems strange. But maybe the demand from a
| relatively few Japanophiles doesn't outweigh the adminstrative
| costs of maintaining a much larger number of SKUs (including
| regulatory requirements) and they'd send boxes of green tea
| chocolate to go out of date on shelves. I'd have thought a big
| corporate would have pretty scalable product range management
| but maybe it's just cheaper to hand that off to importers. Some
| calculation must presumably be involved.
|
| Though I like to think the Nestle/Hershey executives have been
| threatened by immaculately-suited Pocky-toting enforcers of the
| importers making profits on the novelty arbitrage.
| asmor wrote:
| They're good flavors, but not quite mass market compatible
| outside Japan I'd presume. I used to live in a city with a
| large japanese enclave and they were pretty well available from
| local asian grocery stores, though still 5 times as expensive
| as regular.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I don't think it's a boner over withholding flavors.
|
| It's likely a profit boner. Margins on obscure flavors aren't
| projected to be high enough in whatever market, so they don't
| offer it. But in some other market, projections look good, so
| they offer it.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Wait what was the scam how did it work? Was the plan to ransom
| the container to the owner?
| xsmasher wrote:
| Judging from the anger of the second driver, the scam is to
| steal the load and resell it on the black market; the driver
| must not have known what he was picking up? Or maybe they just
| take an up-front payment and disappear.
|
| Why Tristan bothered taking the loads to the storage facilities
| instead of just throwing them out the back is a mystery. Or why
| the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of
| payment.
| mparkms wrote:
| So this guy whose job it is to hire truckers to move goods fell
| for the same scam twice in a row? Fool me once, etc, etc...
| closewith wrote:
| There are lots of high-trust interfaces like this in the legacy
| businesses that make up most of world commerce. It might not be
| feasible to do much more in the way of background checks.
| atombender wrote:
| Previous thread from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889
| lawlessone wrote:
| >Seemingly on cue, Tristan followed up. "Time for some coming
| clean," he confessed. "I'm actually a scammer and the owner of
| HCH doesn't have anything to do with this."
|
| That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have
| said nothing,
| matsemann wrote:
| To me it almost sounds like the scam is to get the goods into a
| storage facility they own and extort the owner of the goods for
| a high storage fee to get it released. And also rack up the
| fees by denying any claim of actual ownership for some period.
| Aka the scammer wants the victim to know where the goods are.
|
| So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.
| zoky wrote:
| Especially when they hadn't even made any money on the scam,
| according to the article. What's the angle here?
|
| It's a bit far-fetched I suppose, but the only possible
| explanation I can see for all of this is that this is an
| attempted (but bungled) insurance fraud scheme on the part of
| Bokksu. Especially given the conclusion of the article, where
| it turns out that a Bokksu subsidiary was in charge of handing
| off the shipment to the supposed trucking company. I wonder if
| there were actually Kit Kats in the shipment at all...
| pstrateman wrote:
| Suspiciously convenient for filling an insurance claim to have
| a direct admission of fraud.
| mikestew wrote:
| For a moment there I thought it was going to be a company by one
| of HN's users: Candy Japan. Same business: Japanese candy
| subscription service. But the user profile says Candy Japan is no
| more. :-(
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe] of a NYT article
|
| More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| The NYT article measures distances in miles but this one uses
| kilometers. Otherwise they seem identical?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to
| create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of
| "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect
| them with freight loads that need to move from one place to
| another. If the company does the vetting and works with an
| insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at
| fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture some
| value from creating a safer market.
| tristor wrote:
| Unless I'm missing something, this already exists. This is
| basically what the entire LTL freight market is based around.
| Am I missing something?
| carabiner wrote:
| https://www.uberfreight.com/ https://convoy.com/
| praseodym wrote:
| YC already invested in several companies in this domains:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?industry=Supply%20Cha...
| mike_d wrote:
| According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo
| containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m.
| By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships
| every year.
|
| The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay
| a dollar more per container to deal with it.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| This sounds like a scam run by the storage companies. Otherwise
| it is hard to understand what motivation "Tristan" had to drop
| the product off there instead of just, say, abandoning it on the
| side of the road. I can imagine a scammer getting upset that
| their load was a bunch of candy and not laptops or something else
| of high value, but why take it to a storage unit after accepting
| the load?
| hiddencost wrote:
| Sometimes if you can get someone on the hook you can keep
| extracting money from them. "You need to pay us for storage."
| "Oh sorry we forgot to mention, you need to pay the customs
| agent." "We need to cover our gas expenses."
|
| So they may have actually dumped the goods but seeing if they
| could get any more out of the mark.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| But Tristan never got paid anything, and came right out and
| told the person he was a scammer before telling him exactly
| where to find his freight and never tried to extract any
| money from the victim.
|
| So either he's a scammer with a heart of gold and didn't want
| a bunch of chocolate to go to waste, or he's in on it somehow
| with the storage facilities.
| mike_d wrote:
| The actual scam here didn't play out, so NYTimes does not have
| the full story.
|
| What happens is they truck the load to a yard and open it up.
| The contents of the trailer are then stolen and dumped into the
| gray market. If it has no value the load gets dumped into a
| storage facility and because the goods are accounted for law
| enforcement won't get involved.
|
| The load was coming from Japan and probably insured for a lot
| of money, which ticked all the boxes that it would be
| electronics or household goods of some sort. They were probably
| shocked when it was just a brunch of weird flavors of candy
| they couldn't sell.
| lynguist wrote:
| This was exciting storytelling! It felt like reading a fast-paced
| almost AI-generated turn-by-turn absurdist short novel. Something
| like Gogol's Nose.
|
| I couldn't predict any of the sentences in this story, it was a
| really surprising and captivating read. Every new paragraph had a
| new twist.
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