[HN Gopher] The hijacking of $339k worth of rare Japanese KitKats ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-10 23:00 UTC)