For the past few years different companies in Japan have started putting out special seasonal products. These limited time only products are heavily promoted and can be tricky to get your hands on. Beer companies were probably one of the first to offer season flavors. Most of the major brands came out with products offering "the Taste of Summer (or Winter or Fall or Spring)" beer in decorative cans with a unique taste for the season. You could almost tell the changing of the season by the appearance of the new cans in the alcohol section of the super-market.
Another company that has started offering limited time only products is Akagi Nyugyo and their wildly popular "Gari Gari Kun" popsicles. "Gari Gari" means skinny in Japanese. The character on the package is a chubby , round faced boy so maybe my translator is off. "Gari Gari" could also mean crunchy but that doesn't fit for Popsicles either. In any case, the most popular flavor of "Gari Gari Kun" popsicle has always been there soda flavor. In Japan soda flavor is comparable to cream soda in North America except that it's blue. I think that GGK is popular not because of its color but because it is big and cheaper than any other blue Popsicle.
A few years ago GGK started introducing limited time only flavors. Last summer GGK attached themselves to the hype that came with Star Wars being re-released in 3D. You could buy "cookies and cream" GGK and if you were lucky and your Popsicle stick was a winner you got a GGK/Star Wars T-shirt. I made a mission to get myself a shirt. I ate GGK Popsicles by the box full. Over the course of the summer I must have crunched down over 100. But no T-shirt. I tried to research what the T-shirt looked like and found out that there were people even more obsessed than I was. One fanatic saved all his losing sticks to show how unlucky he was. He claimed that he had over 300 losing sticks. It was then that I decided to give up my quest for the elusive shirt. If fact I vowed I wouldn't eat another GGK again. Given that the summer sauna-like weather was finished this promise was easy to keep. Until of course the this past summer when the new season flavor was announced...
"Gari Gari Kun Rich Corn Potage" or for us less refined diners "Cream Corn Soup Popsicle". This is a flavor that I would never have dreamed of. It is a stroke of marketing genius. It doesn't matter how gross the taste is because it will get the gimmick consuming buyer in a flash. GGK no longer has to rely on Star Wars to get people to buy popsicles. The can create the most outrageous flavor and watch people buy it for the novelty. I'm pretty certain that they didn't get many repeat customers but they probably opened themselves up to new one time buyers. Whether or not the campaign was successful at lease their name now makes more sense. With little bits of corn in the popsicle it is almost crunchy. Perhaps if next years flavor is "Salt 'n' Vinegar Chips" the name will be a perfect match.
