A little while back, after Burrage had scoffed down a Kit Kat or two from the UK, I asked if there was any difference between UK and Australian Kit Kats. Burrage dutifully sent me some of the Australian variety to try out and compare for myself.
To avoid any potential bias against the inferior Australian product, I’ll endeavour to create a blind taste test for myself. Unfortunately, teaching my cat the scientific method has proven to be too difficult in the past, so I am performing the experiment on my own. This has its own complications. I do not have a third-party to trust to offer me the Kit Kat snack without telling me its origin, leading me to create my own method.
I take an Australian Kit Kat and a UK Kit Kat and unwrap them. To prevent accidental bias I throw the wrappers away, put both Kit Kats in a big bag, and twist the bag around several times. Now I take several deeps breaths until I am a little light-headed and can’t quite remember why I was holding a bag, let alone which Kit Kat comes from which country. This is such genius it has to work, there is no potential for any bias here.
Of course, half-way through the second tasty Kit Kat, its crunchy wafers each wrapped in chocolate, and the whole bundle then covered with even more chocolate, split in to several fingers to multiply the delicious snack by four, I realise that if I cannot tell which Kit Kat comes from which country I cannot feasibly compare the two directly. All I can say is one is better than the other, or not. I probably shouldn’t have thrown the wrappers away, and instead placed the snacks on the face-down wrappers and mixed them up a bit.
That’s something to learn for the next time, mostly because I only had the one UK Kit Kat and I can’t be bothered to go and get another one. Luckily, Burrage sent me two Kit Kats, as well as a strawberry Kit Kat! Yum! I’ll just have to make up any differences I perceive and hope I get lucky.
The long preamble should probably highlight that the UK and Australian Kit Kats are identical as far as I can tell, from the colour and shape of the packet to the four fingers inside. The branding on the chocolate-coated wafer fingers also suggests I should go back and edit all of my references to Kit Kats to remove the hyphen, although you won’t notice the change.
Australian Kit Kats are also constructed in a similar fashion to the UK variety, with multiple layers of wafer sandwiched together by chocolate, then the wafer fingers coated with even more chocolate. As for the taste, I don’t think there’s much in it. I think the Australian Kit Kat has sweeter chocolate, or maybe the chocolate has a different texture; maybe both. It’s certainly at least as tasty as a UK Kit Kat, and I certainly wouldn’t feel homesick for these should I ever move to Australia.
There’s something peculiar on the packaging, called the Nutritional Compass, which is trademarked. The Nestlé website does it more credit than I would give it on the Kit Kat packaging, as the compass doesn’t appear to point to any nutritional information at all, just some blurb about believing in balance. That is, it doesn’t point at nutritional information if you have split the packet along the length of its spine and laid it flat on a desk.
With the packet whole one point of the compass does indeed point towards the ingredients and nutrition information.
There’s not much more to say about the packaging, apart from the little man encouraging proper disposal of the Kit Kat wrapper is a Kit Kat ‘K’, which is a nice touch.
I mentioned above that Burrage sent me a strawberry flavoured Kit Kat too, which is something I haven’t seen over here in the UK! It has ‘NEW’ emblazoned on the pink packaging, which suggests it is not something Australia has had for long, as well as reassuring me that it’s not here yet as I probably would have spotted something so pink sitting on the shelf.
The packaging shows the normal Kit Kat single wafer being broken in two, but with a pink filling that is more suggestive of Turkish Delight than a strawberry wafer. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. And before I tuck in to some strawberry chocolate, there is a Nutritional Compass(TM) on the back of this packaging too, except this time there really is no arrow pointing towards the nutritional information below it!
I would be surprised if someone managed to delete the arrow when they just needed to flick the switch from ‘red’ to ‘pink’, although it would be fun to think that the exploded packaging on the CAD screen led someone else to think that the arrow was pointing in to thin air, much as I did, and that’s why it got deleted. Heads will roll!
Opening the packet brings a satisfying smell of fake-strawberry flavour to my nostrils. There is not much of a hint of pink yet, just the normal brown chocolate staring back at me, tempting me to bite in to it. Which I shall do!
Well, what do you know, it’s just like a normal Kit Kat but with a hint of strawberry mixed in with the chocolatey goodness, and a stronger aftertaste of strawberry. This is good, but not a particularly exciting difference overall. The wafers are indeed coloured pink, but not terribly noticeable for it, and I would be more inclined to choose this Kit Kat over the regular version were the chocolate itself pink. I suppose the pink packaging is enough of a difference for the Nestlé boffins. I would be happy only to have normal Kit Kats, although this pink strawberry one would make a change every now and again.
In conclusion, Kit Kats are good on at least two continents. Yum!