Glico Salted Caramel Pocky — Winter Edition, 2 Packs

A winter-only Pocky: buttery caramel chocolate over the biscuit stick, with fine grains of salt scattered across the surface. It is sweet and rich, and the salt is what keeps it from being too much. Buy it if you like salted caramel; if you want the clean snap of the plain red box, this one is a good deal richer than that.

冬のきらめきポッキー: fuyu no kirameki, "winter sparkle". The sparkle is the salt.

What you're getting

• You can see the salt. Fine grains sit on the surface and catch the light. Every so often you bite one and get a small crunch of salt against the caramel, which is a different thing from a sweet that is merely salted.
• There is real butter in it, and you can taste it. Browned butter goes into both the chocolate and the biscuit, at just under one per cent of the coating. What comes through when you eat it is butter rather than anything specifically browned: worth knowing so you are not hunting for a flavour that does not arrive.
• Richer than the plain red box. This is Pocky as a treat rather than a snack. A whole bag in one go is a lot of sweet caramel.
• A winter-only run in Japan. It is made for the season and not restocked after it. What is here is what there is until next winter.
• It will not enjoy a Sydney summer. Glico's instruction is to keep it below 28 °C, and the chocolate is on the outside where the heat reaches first. In warm weather it softens, and a hot-day delivery can arrive softer than it left.
• Allergens: contains milk, wheat and soy. Read the pack's own label before you rely on ours.

Glico sells two winter Pocky side by side and they are easy to mix up, which matters for one reason: if you go looking, you will find news of a Glico recall of a winter Pocky in Japan in December 2025. That was the other one, the cocoa-dusted Fuyu no Kuchidoke. This box is not on Glico's own list of affected products.