Though Allsorts are meant to be played with, they are popular among what the company calls ‘‘big kids’’ — those from 18 to 54. She told everyone to write down any words that came to mind, whether they were one of the five basic tastes or any of the trillions of aromas the nose can detect. “Your turn,” she told the group. The wafer was the corporate secret, the heavily guarded soul of the Kit Kat. Recently, Ross’s of Edinburgh, the only company to manufacture the candy in Scotland, was set to close, as no descendants wanted to take over the family business. In its 75-year history, the candy has become popular around the world. Since 1975, more than 170 Hi-Chew flavors have been on the market.

Not so.) The sensation was utterly delightful. A Nestlé executive told me it was the shape of the connected pieces: those long, skinny ingots with their recognizable, ridge-like feet of chocolate surrounding each base. Though it has had some tweaks since then, that daisy-shaped logo — and the fact that it’s placed at the top of the pop — remains, as does the name, which translates to something like ‘‘sucky suck.’’ Since they were first released in the 1950s, the candies have become available in 177 countries and even made it to outer space in 1994, when Russian astronauts brought them to the Mir space station. In any Scandinavian country, you’ve got to watch out for salted licorice; there are at least a dozen different kinds, and all of them taste to me like old spoons.

The pops are also popular in Tanzania and South Africa, where Trade Kings claims that it opened the largest candy-manufacturing line in the Southern Hemisphere in 2010. It is crisp but not brittle. “Sensory is all about using your five senses to make an assessment about a food product,” Kimmerle explained to me. Since the 1930s, each piece has come wrapped in words from artists, writers and philosophers, supposedly a nod to the notes the two lovers would secretly pass each other. The story goes that the treat gets its name from Brig.

The chocolate bar is known for its emotive commercials; in the 1980s, they used the slogan ‘‘Even solitude feels sweet when with Ghana.’’ Recently Ghana commercials have featured the Korean actor and heartthrob Park Bo-gum.Lacta chocolate started in the 1960s as Galacta, named for gala, the Greek word for milk. ‘‘Love in Action’’ was shown on Greece’s biggest TV channel on Valentine’s Day. that’s partly dependent on cocoa export.

The company recycles these substandard wafers as local animal feed.

After Kohzoh Takaoka, now chief executive of Nestlé Japan, persuaded Takagi to work with the company, Takagi decided he wanted to make the bars more sophisticated, to play with the form and sweetness levels.

Early Japanese TV commercials for the candy drew on the chocolate bar’s British roots to promote it as a foreign product, depicting British soldiers breaking for a treat.

You will either like it or not, but you’ll have a conversation topic with Finns for your whole life. One of them, John Miller, had brought a chocolate-making machine with him from Scotland, and they used it to create the Savoy chocolate bar. Mars could pick up the phone and call any plant and ask, ‘How is the chocolate?’ and get an answer in plain English. Red was some sort of generic artificial berry.

“Whether they were in Waco, Texas, or Hackettstown, New Jersey, they were speaking a common language,” Fossum recalled. The factory is large and open, loud and clean, its production lines totally transparent.

A result was the relatively straightforward method of evaluation I’d observed: less reliance on jargon, more on the senses.“Flavor itself is a language,” Fossum told me over the phone from her home in Plymouth, Mass. This is why there’s no one candy bar or bottle of wine that is universally beloved. Here, the individual segments are being coated at the factory in Kasumigaura.Kit Kat flavors including plum wine, purple sweet potato and Shinshu apple at a Don Quijote megastore in Tokyo.Tomoko Ohashi making green-tea and strawberry Kit Kats in the Kasumigaura test kitchen.Wrapped Kit Kats at Nestlé Japan’s Kasumigaura factory before being sorted into packaging.An assortment of Kit Kat flavors found in Japan, including sake.Tomoko Ohashi making green-tea and strawberry Kit Kats in the test kitchen.Left: Shingen mochi produced by Kikyouya. My grandmother, who lived in a small town near the Venezuelan border, bought large quantities of Colombina was born in the Cauca Valley, where the land is hot and humid. Response? Since then, the company has released almost 400 more flavors, some of them available only in particular regions of the country, which tends to encourage a sense of rareness and collectibility.

“They fought for an hour,” the sheriff says. Tar candy!”“I remember tasting pure ammonium chloride,” Hellsten said. Ammonia chloride, the ingredient which gives There is no real answer as to why the strange flavour combination is so popular in Finland, or why it is practically a part of Finland’s national identity. As in, maybe the most sour thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.

Super Hiper Ácido (S.H.A.)