I went to the store the other day and I saw a fake candy bar. When I first glanced at it I thought it was a Hershey bar, and I was all excited. After carefully inspecting the package I was disappointed to find out that this was not a Hershey bar, but a Kaiser’s bar.
I have seen (and purchased) this brand before, however I am always fooled by the the deceptive packaging. Who is Kaiser, and why is he imitating my favourite chocolate? Taiwan seems to love fakes. We even have fake iPod shuffles here.
I purchased this fake Kaiser bar before, and I was not that impressed. Chinese chocolate is like American Chinese food. It is almost right, but the details are lost. The chocolate is too waxy, is rough and the word “milk” is somewhat deceiving because there is milk flavouring, not milk.
Juregen’s Chocolate Wrapper site has translated the back of the Chocolate bar for us to read:
Kaiser chocolate is made from such best-quality European raw material and automatic integrated machines imported from Europe. Because of its excellent quality and distinctive taste, this chocolate is as good as other well-known imported brands. Please enjoy the Kaiser chocolate which is pleasing your taste most.
Doesn’t that sound delicious?
Kaiser isn’t the only imitation here in Taiwan. I also saw a company that imitates Nabisco’s Ritz crackers. I have yet to buy them, but I did photograph them in the grocery store:
2 responses so far ↓
Lon Guyland // April 24, 2007 at 13:02
I was in Pingdong for qing ming and my daughter bought some of their phony kisses. She forced me to eat some and they were awful. You description is very apt. We ended up joking about them all day. Even for a chocoholic better nothing than that crap.
Lon Guyland // April 24, 2007 at 13:12
They don’t just copy foreign stuff though, they copy their own.
A well known local brand of toothpaste is 黑人 (hei ren) which at one time had ‘Darkie’ as its English name. There’s a picture of a black man in top hat and flashing teeth. At some point they were made aware how offensive that seemed and they changed the English to ‘Darlie’, though the Chinese characters remained the same.
I only recently noticed either another brand called ‘White Man’ or maybe it’s just a new line of toothpaste from the same old folks.