Snack brand Calbee from Japan is known for its wide range of potato chips, potato stick snacks like Jagabee and Jagarico, as well as their Kappa Ebisen shrimp crackers. Since 2011 it has held an annual original "Snack Contest", looking for ideas from children on different themes every year. In 2019, for their 9th contest, the theme was "healthy snacks using vegetable ingredients." It took over a year of research and develop, but the first place winner of the 9th "Snack Contest" will go on sale in limited quantities on Calbee's online store from Thursday.
The winning entry, called koro koro vejitaburu (Coro Coro Vegetable), submitted by an elementary school student, is a collection of cube-shaped snacks of several different vegetable flavors, stacked together to form a larger cube.
Calbee considered that it was "a unique idea in line with the theme of the contest", and the final selection was decided through a web vote by Calbee employees.
According to japantoday.com¸ there were various difficulties in developing it in order to make it a fun product for children. Calbee formed a project team transcending department boundaries, researched texture, ingredients, and conducted over 100 trials before reaching the final product. As you can imagine, manually stacking cube-shaped snacks one by one like building blocks is no easy task, but Calbee devised a special layout to make the end product look cute.
