Glico Bisco Fermented Butter Biscuits — 15 Biscuits

The yellow box, and the one where Glico changes the biscuit rather than the cream: a salted butter biscuit around a vanilla cream flecked with vanilla seed. What you notice is the salt against the sweetness. Everyday supermarket confectionery in Japan, not a gift-tin product. Buy it if a salted biscuit against a sweet cream sounds like your kind of thing; if you want a straightforwardly sweet cream biscuit, take the red box instead.

Fermented butter: hakkō batā, is butter churned from cream that has been cultured first, the way most European butter is made and most Australian butter is not. It carries a faint tang and a deeper, nuttier smell than sweet-cream butter, which is why a Japanese biscuit maker reaches for it when it wants a biscuit to taste of something.

ビスコ＜発酵バター＞: bisuko hakkō batā. The yellow box, with the same boy on the front that Glico has been redrawing since 1933.

What you're getting

• Sweet-and-salty, and the salt is the reason to buy it. There is noticeably more salt in this biscuit than in the plain Bisco, and it plays against a sweet vanilla cream.
• The biscuit changes, not just the cream. The red and pink boxes use a milk biscuit; this one is a butter biscuit, closer to a shortbread or a cracker in the hand, and firmer to bite.
• Vanilla bean, not just vanilla flavour. Vanilla bean seed is in the ingredient list — look for the flecks in the cream.
• The honest one, and it matters here more than usual: you may not taste much butter. The butter reads faint, and it has read that way for a decade, not just since the recipe changed. Take "fermented butter" as the kind of biscuit it is, not as a promise about aroma.
• If you knew this box before April 2025, expect a difference. Glico reformulated the whole Bisco range then, and the change is argued over in Japan: worth knowing before you buy, particularly if you are re-buying something you remember.
• Fifteen small biscuits in three sealed packs of five. They are small, and the three sachets are why the last five are as crisp as the first. The sachets are stiff to tear, and a small child may not manage one alone.
• Allergens: contains milk and wheat. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

If you have seen Bisco sold as a long-life emergency ration in a sealed tin, that is a different product from this one: a different pack, made to sit in a cupboard for years. This is the ordinary box. The front of the pack makes a good deal of the cultures in the cream; treat that as part of what Bisco is rather than as a reason to buy it, because we are not making any claim about what it does. This is not a premium line in Japan and is not priced as one: "grown-up Bisco" is about the salt, not the shelf. And if you are buying it for a child, Glico's own guidance is from about one year old, with an adult watching. A whole biscuit is a big mouthful at three, so break it up.