CRATZ チェダーチーズ

CRATZ is a line of beer snacks - you can tell by the picture of the beer on the package - that are a mix of almonds and little crunchy pretzel-like sections that come in three different flavors, Cheddar Cheese, Pepper Bacon, and Krazy Salt & Chicken. A surprisingly infectious snack, they've got a hard crunch, overwrought flavors, tons of salt, and the mediating factor of natural almonds. Sampling the Cheddar Cheese (チェダーチーズ), the palate and the nose are immediately assaulted by an ur-cheese flavor and smell. After a couple of chews, though, sensory fatigue sets in. The flavor of cheese powder, salt, and flavor enhancers lend to overload that can only be balanced with drinking a lot of beer. Insidiously brilliant!

These little buggers are brought to you by Glico, the Osaka-based food giant that staked its claim on the industrial food landscape of Japan in 1919 when founder Riichi Ezaki discovered he could extract glycogen from oysters for use in confectionery production. Hmm. The name Glico is a glycogen shortened. They hit the market with their trademark caramels, but are perhaps most famous to westerners from Pocky, the fun candy sticks, originally made in chocolate, but now in myriad flavors. 

Glico hit the news big in the mid 80s with an unsolved mystery involving the kidnapping of  then-president, Katsuhisa Ezaki, by a man who described himself as the Monster with 21 Faces (かい人21面相). Ezaki escaped, threats of poisoning the candy supply, various other news-catching criminal exploits, and the self-immolation of the Shiga Prefecture police superintendent at his failure to capture the Monster (who was now being described as the Fox-Eyed Man  - キツネ目の男) followed. 

After the death of the police superintendent, the Monster sent his last missive stating:

"Yamamoto of Shiga Prefecture Police died. How stupid of him! We've got no friends or secret hiding place in Shiga. It's Yoshino or Shikata who should have died. What have they been doing for as long as one year and five months? Don't let bad guys like us get away with it. There are many more fools who want to copy us. No-career Yamamoto died like a man. So we decided to give our condolence. We decided to forget about torturing food-making companies. If anyone blackmails any of the food-making companies, it's not us but someone copying us. We are bad guys. That means we've got more to do other than bullying companies. It's fun to lead a bad man's life. Monster with 21 Faces"

With that, he ended his moment of terror and disappeared.

  

It is interesting though, that a recent ad for CRATZ shows an ostensibly humorous situation, wherein the consumption of these crunchy bits creates a shape-shifting in the visages of the happy snackers - perhaps a clue to one of the 21 faces.