Glico Pocky Almond Crush Chocolate Sticks — 2 Packs

Chocolate-coated pretzel sticks with coarsely broken roasted almonds pressed all over the coating, on a wholemeal biscuit made with almond praline. Almond sits third on the ingredient list, ahead of the milk and the cocoa, and you can taste that, though whether it tastes more of nut or more of chocolate genuinely divides people, and the crunch comes from the nut rather than the biscuit either way. Buy it if you want the nut to be the point; if you want a straightforward chocolate stick, the plain red box is the one you want, not this.

アーモンドクラッシュポッキー: a-mon-do ku-rash-shu pok-kii, the name on the blue box.

What you're getting

• Fourteen sticks, seven in each of two sealed bags. Worth knowing before you buy, because it is the one thing about this box that disappoints people, it goes faster than the size of it suggests, and the count has not changed since 2019. The two bags are genuinely useful though: open one, keep one.
• The crunch is the almond, not the biscuit. Coarse broken pieces rather than a dust, so you get a proper hard bite against the snap of the stick. The chocolate covers most of the stick and leaves the top bare, which is the whole reason Pocky exists.
• Real chocolate, and a wholemeal stick underneath. Cacao mass (ground cocoa beans) and cocoa butter are both on the list, and the pretzel is made with wholemeal flour and a little almond praline: it has a definite bready, savoury note under the sweetness rather than tasting like a plain sugar biscuit.
• It divides people on sweetness, and that's worth knowing. The same milk chocolate tastes too sweet to some people and too faint to others, opposite complaints about one coating. Which way it goes depends on what you came for, and there is no consensus to hand you.
• Try it out of the fridge. Chilling firms the chocolate and sharpens the snap. Handy here for a second reason too: this is a chocolate-coated stick and it is not built for a hot letterbox. Keep it below 28 °C, which is Glico's own instruction.
• Allergens: contains milk, wheat, soy and almond. This is the only Pocky we sell that carries a tree nut. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

One thing to clear up before you order: this is Almond Crush Pocky, not the Almond Pocky some people remember. That was a different line, sold from 1971 to 2003 with brief revivals in 2009 and 2011, and Japanese buyers mix the two up as often as anyone else does. And this is the Japanese domestic box; the almond Pocky Australian supermarkets range is a different pack under a different name.