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The hijacking of rare Japanese KitKats
- fennecbutt 3y agoSo stupid though, we have the technology to solve this problem, why don't truckers have an I'd card that stores a key to "sign" for taking the goods into their possession. There's all sorts of ways this could be solved.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn’t kit kat just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal with the boner these companies have about withholding certain flavors in certain markets?
- abhorrence 3y agoPresumably in this case it has something to do with how Hershey owns the rights for Kit-Kat in the USA, but Nestle everywhere (at least as far as I know) else.
- georgel 3y agoThe manufacturers likely don't want to deal with additional SKUs and logistics for what is a low volume item in those regions. Allergies/ingredient disclosure might present challenges as well.
- busterarm 3y agoBecause it's two different companies. KitKat around the world is Nestle. KitKat in the US is under license to Hershey. Licensing is expensive.
- twic 3y agoIt's Nestle in the UK, and they don't sell the Japanese bonus snacks here either.
- projektfu 3y agoLicense it to Mondelez and suddenly it will have lots of flavors you won't likely buy....
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoKitKat are already full of wafer so Mondelez wouldn't be motivated to 'put anything in the chocolate bar at all so long as it's not chocolate'. What's cheaper than wafer? I guess if they can make more of the inside wafer, so there's less chocolate coating? Perhaps you can make wafer bubbly, so it's more air? Although it's cheaper to just put it in a plastic wrapper and fill the wrapper with nitrogen...
- busterarm 3y agoIt's also hard to understand just how popular KitKats are in Japan and how their products and limited time offers cater uniquely to the Japanese audience. KitKat has a lot of competition in the UK where caramels are way more popular than weird KK flavors.
- ralferoo 3y agoIf you go to the Japan Centre in London you can find various flavours of Japanese Kitkats.
- qingcharles 3y agoI can't recommend anyone going to Japan Centre because you will spend a lot of money. Last time I was there I spent about £100 on sweets that had tiny little train cars in them and the chocolate was terrible and I ate all of it.
- dharmab 3y agoJapanese retail space (as in, the physical space available in the stores) favors small batches. US retail space favors economies of scale.
- ajmurmann 3y agoDo you know why this is? This seems to be true across a variety of products, including way more interesting fast food offerings.
- numpad0 3y agoIt does seem like Japanese brands are more optimized for smaller size and number of batches. Could be due to accommodating logistics, media hype culture, denser population, omnipresent convenience stores, etc.
- lbotos 3y agoKitKat in the USA is run by Hershey. KitKat globally is run by Nestle. That's one reason why. The second is that in Japan Kit Kat sounds like "good luck" which is why they became popular, and two, why we see such regional variation. (I have 4 Japanese flavors in my NYC fridge right now -- Sweet Potato, Adult Sweetness, Wheat, and Caramel Pudding (which you bake!)
- robotnikman 3y agoI just ended up ordering some myself after finding out about these lol. Another perk I've found about treats from overseas is they use actual sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup.
- SECProto 3y agosugar instead of HFCS, cocoa butter instead of palm oil. There's definitely better quality in some markets and products than others
- reactordev 3y agoexcept they use palm oil in the caramel pudding recipe. >"Ingredients: Chocolate (Sugar, Lactose, Vegetable Oil(palm)whole milk powder, cocoa butter), wheat flour, vegetable oil, lactose, sugar, caramel powder (skim milk, concentrated milk), yeast extract, cocoa powder, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, emulsifier(lethal, sucrose fatty acid ester, glycerin fatty acid ester), sodium bicarbonate, flavor, yeast extract,(contains wheat, milk, soybeans)"
- SECProto 3y agoYes, I wasn't referring specifically to japanese kitkats - I don't know what's in them, been a couple years. But the use of palm oil has become pretty pervasive and (maybe it's placebo effect) the flavour has declined.
- reactordev 3y agoThat's pretty much true of most overseas candies and chocolates. Some of the best chocolates from Europe use cocoa butter and real sugar. Not Processed Cocoa Powder, HFCS, additives, colorings, preservatives, and then tempered with plastic.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoIt certainly seems strange. But maybe the demand from a relatively few Japanophiles doesn't outweigh the adminstrative costs of maintaining a much larger number of SKUs (including regulatory requirements) and they'd send boxes of green tea chocolate to go out of date on shelves. I'd have thought a big corporate would have pretty scalable product range management but maybe it's just cheaper to hand that off to importers. Some calculation must presumably be involved. Though I like to think the Nestlé/Hershey executives have been threatened by immaculately-suited Pocky-toting enforcers of the importers making profits on the novelty arbitrage.
- _cenw 3y agoThey're good flavors, but not quite mass market compatible outside Japan I'd presume. I used to live in a city with a large japanese enclave and they were pretty well available from local asian grocery stores, though still 5 times as expensive as regular.
- ziddoap 3y agoI don't think it's a boner over withholding flavors. It's likely a profit boner. Margins on obscure flavors aren't projected to be high enough in whatever market, so they don't offer it. But in some other market, projections look good, so they offer it.
- bombcar 3y agoAnd something can be profitable for importers and not worth it for the company, additional tracking, stocking, etc. Much simpler to have a few flavors shipped to millions of stores daily.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rtpg 3y agoThe untold thing here is that the KitKats are honestly not that good. The best ones are basically "huh, kinda intersting odd flavor", but especially in Europe I've only basically been met with disgust at the flavored kitkats. The normal ones are fine, but they're not magic
- changoplatanero 3y agoWait what was the scam how did it work? Was the plan to ransom the container to the owner?
- xsmasher 3y agoJudging from the anger of the second driver, the scam is to steal the load and resell it on the black market; the driver must not have known what he was picking up? Or maybe they just take an up-front payment and disappear. Why Tristan bothered taking the loads to the storage facilities instead of just throwing them out the back is a mystery. Or why the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of payment.
- closewith 3y ago> Or why the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of payment. That part is less of a mystery. The whole industry runs on credit.
- solatic 3y agoMy hypothesis: The key to the whole scam is that the shipments are cross-continental and that there's no observability into where the shipment is during that time. The scammer immediately drops off the load at a storage facility, which begins to bill for storage time, several days later, when the load is supposed to arrive on the other side of the country, the owner comes looking for it and the storage facility presents the owner with an invoice for storage time that wasn't originally needed. The owner pays the storage facility, which sold storage space that would have gone unused, and the storage facility pays the driver a finder's fee kickback. It's a variant on the squeegee window washers' scam. Pull up at the stoplight and the scammer starts washing your window, then demands payment for a service you didn't agree to. Victims pay because the amount of money is too small relative to the hassle of being held up, not because they (didn't) freely purchased a service that they got real value out of.
- mparkms 3y agoSo this guy whose job it is to hire truckers to move goods fell for the same scam twice in a row? Fool me once, etc, etc...
- closewith 3y agoThere are lots of high-trust interfaces like this in the legacy businesses that make up most of world commerce. It might not be feasible to do much more in the way of background checks.
- heavenlyblue 3y agoThey get paid good money to do all of this, scammers have reaised that the king has no clothes and are profiteering on them, which I think is fair.
- jodrellblank 3y agoHe took $13,000 to post an ad on “Craigslist for truckers”. Why couldn’t Bokksu skip him and do that directly?
- Aeolun 3y agoI mean, how is there no way to authenticate the truckers you charter on that platform, or when they arrive to pick up the load. Presumably the least they can do is identify the person.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- atombender 3y agoPrevious thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889
- lawlessone 3y ago>Seemingly on cue, Tristan followed up. “Time for some coming clean,” he confessed. “I’m actually a scammer and the owner of HCH doesn’t have anything to do with this.” That's on odd admission from the scammer, when they could have said nothing,
- matsemann 3y agoTo me it almost sounds like the scam is to get the goods into a storage facility they own and extort the owner of the goods for a high storage fee to get it released. And also rack up the fees by denying any claim of actual ownership for some period. Aka the scammer wants the victim to know where the goods are. So almost like a shady towing company taking a car.
- lawlessone 3y agoThat is what I am thinking too.
- Matthias247 3y agoIt sounds like it, but it still doesn't make sense to me. A scammer would want to be anonymous so they can't be prosecuted. But a warehouse owner would be well known.
- TheCleric 3y agoThat’s the thing. You have the “unassociated” scammer admit to it otherwise they don’t know to come get the shipment (and pay the fee).
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoMaybe the scammer got stuck on the storage fee and paperwork too while he spent the time searching for a buyer for this unique product. Then when he identified the fence he was into storage fees deeper than his liquidity (beyond merely cutting the scam in half-- his first plan). So he had the broker pay storage, release the product, then targeted the broker a second time with the same scam-- same board, same method, this time laser-focused and with success.
- mikestew 3y agoFor a moment there I thought it was going to be a company by one of HN's users: Candy Japan. Same business: Japanese candy subscription service. But the user profile says Candy Japan is no more. :-(
- vharuck 3y agoFor anyone looking for a Japanese candy and snack subscription service, I enjoyed bokksu: https://www.bokksu.com/ https://www.bokksu.com/
- Matthias247 3y agoThat's actually the company whose kitkat journey is documented in the linked article
- qingcharles 3y agoTell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.
- atombender 3y agoI used to get boxes from them. Candy Japan is/was a one person operation run by a Finnish guy named Bemmu, who also blogged about his life in Japan. His user profile is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu. It now says it was shut down, so I guess it's official. Weird that he wouldn't update the site, though, which just says it's temporarily paused. I'm not surprised that decided to shut it down; it seemed like a lot of work, and there are now a number of competitors doing the same thing at a much higher volume, with free world-wide shipping, glossy packaging, and so on.
- bemmu 3y agoYes, it’s shut down. Reading this story made me happy about no longer having to deal with physical goods.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] of a NYT article More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195889
- andrelaszlo 3y agoThe NYT article measures distances in miles but this one uses kilometers. Otherwise they seem identical?
- notpushkin 3y agoWonder if it's legitimate syndication or they just decided to YOLO copypaste the article. On the upside though, it's not paywalled!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pvg 3y agoTakes more than five comments to make a dupe, typically.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoYeah fine but this is a straight lift of the Times content. Thread should be moved.
- pvg 3y agoThey license it. You can mail the mods if you want the URL changed though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 3y agoThis reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect them with freight loads that need to move from one place to another. If the company does the vetting and works with an insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture some value from creating a safer market.
- tristor 3y agoUnless I'm missing something, this already exists. This is basically what the entire LTL freight market is based around. Am I missing something?
- ChuckMcM 3y agoI was struck by these two paragraphs in the article: Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000. Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly. Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing? Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
- oh_sigh 3y agoThis sounds like a scam run by the storage companies. Otherwise it is hard to understand what motivation "Tristan" had to drop the product off there instead of just, say, abandoning it on the side of the road. I can imagine a scammer getting upset that their load was a bunch of candy and not laptops or something else of high value, but why take it to a storage unit after accepting the load?
- hiddencost 3y agoSometimes if you can get someone on the hook you can keep extracting money from them. "You need to pay us for storage." "Oh sorry we forgot to mention, you need to pay the customs agent." "We need to cover our gas expenses." So they may have actually dumped the goods but seeing if they could get any more out of the mark.
- oh_sigh 3y agoBut Tristan never got paid anything, and came right out and told the person he was a scammer before telling him exactly where to find his freight and never tried to extract any money from the victim. So either he's a scammer with a heart of gold and didn't want a bunch of chocolate to go to waste, or he's in on it somehow with the storage facilities.
- quickthrower2 3y agoHe paid $2000 but doesn’t seem enough to make the scam worthwhile. Maybe the “happy path” is a multimillion cargo and a disinterest conglomerate that will just claim on insurance. Having a low value cargo and a very interested one man band is not worth the risk of getting caught.
- mike_d 3y agoThe actual scam here didn't play out, so NYTimes does not have the full story. What happens is they truck the load to a yard and open it up. The contents of the trailer are then stolen and dumped into the gray market. If it has no value the load gets dumped into a storage facility and because the goods are accounted for law enforcement won't get involved. The load was coming from Japan and probably insured for a lot of money, which ticked all the boxes that it would be electronics or household goods of some sort. They were probably shocked when it was just a brunch of weird flavors of candy they couldn't sell.
- lynguist 3y agoThis was exciting storytelling! It felt like reading a fast-paced almost AI-generated turn-by-turn absurdist short novel. Something like Gogol’s Nose. I couldn’t predict any of the sentences in this story, it was a really surprising and captivating read. Every new paragraph had a new twist.
- Animats 3y agoThis shows up the difference between a freight forwarder and a freight broker.[1] A freight broker is just a matchmaker who takes a cut. A US freight forwarder is stuck with end to end responsibility for the shipment. [1] https://www.penskelogistics.com/solutions/freight-brokerage/forwarder-vs-broker https://www.penskelogistics.com/solutions/freight-brokerage/...
- theultdev 3y ago[flagged]
- skyyler 3y agoHershey's kinda tastes like vomit to me
- haven_xia 3y agoI still don't know why they left another half but not took all kitkats and disappeared.
- solardev 3y agoMaybe they preferred Pocky?
- senkora 3y agoWould it be viable to attach a GPS tracker to each container, to make recovery after something like this easier?
- 9front 3y agoThere's "kit" in this story but no "kat." Don't storage facilities have a procedure to verify who deposits what. And security cameras. Is Tristan a known client of the storage facility? Maybe Vin Diesel drove the truck. Looks to me the storage facilities are on the take. Keep the load for a few weeks then demand payment to release the load. This way the storage space doesn't go unused.
- jprete 3y agoYou’re assuming a level of system coordination that doesn’t exist. The storage facility isn’t going to do a damn thing with security cameras unless the police order it. The police aren’t going to get involved unless there’s a clear shot at convicting someone. And storage facilities hold onto peoples’ goods for nonpayment all the time, that’s literally how the show Storage Wars existed.
- qingcharles 3y agoIn a past life of criminality I used to pay the truck driver who picked up all the pallets of Beanie Babies coming off the ship from China to have one pallet a month go missing. It was roulette what Beanie Babies I would get, but even if they were the most worthless ones I was still getting them below wholesale price, causing much confusion from my competitors as to how I was selling them below retail.
- gantron 3y agoSounds like an interesting story! How big was a pallet? How does one come to know the specific truck driver?
- qingcharles 3y agoThis was back in 1997, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember it being about 6ft x 6ft x 6ft. It was a bunch of cardboard shipping boxes with clear wrap around them. I think I was paying £10,000 per pallet. He told me he would just skip scanning a pallet at the docks as they were loaded into his trailer, and then his mate would meet him at a roadside services on the motorway with a van and they would somehow move the pallet off the semi into the van. Sometimes I would hit the jackpot and get dozens of the really expensive bears. I sold 800 bears once for $250,000 in cash to a guy who flew into the UK from Chicago. The truck driver found me. He must have seen one of my adverts in the press or maybe someone he knew came to one of my Beanie Baby fairs, or heard one of my adverts on the radio. He lived in this crazy council town near me in Bristol where every house appeared to be of government construction, even the church. I remember sitting in his living room one day and there was a literally constant stream of little kids coming through his front door emptying bags of shoplifted merch onto his floor, and he would pick through and buy a couple of things and then they would go to the next house.
- InCityDreams 3y agoI can't wait for more....
- omegadynamics 3y agoTokyo Grift
- keepamovin 3y agoThis was fascinating, but also terrible! I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks. My suspicion is that Danny Tiang may have orchestrated the loss of his valuable Japanese KitKats in order to try to recoup an insurance payment. This may have been simply in response to him doubting an ability to sell the product, or due to a temperature excursion he was notified of en route that made them unsalable, but which he concealed to facilitate their loss and subsequent, admittedly failed, insurance fraud. Is that plausible? I'm not saying it happened and I feel terrible for the guy to not get his KitKats, but the acquisiton casts a bit of doubt on his story I feel.
- kuschku 3y agoOr, much more likely, to prevent further issues in the supply chain he decided to acquire the supply chain.
- keepamovin 3y agoYeah, that sounds reasonable. Well said! But the niggle is that the issue covered in the article occured after the acquisition. What do you say about that? :)
- bragr 3y agoIt might be mundane rather than nefarious. If your business empire intersected a disaster at multiple points, figuring out which of your many insurance policies should pay out could be non-trivial, and reviewing the various terms, you might lean towards a preferred narrative. I guess that's a bit nefarious, but not as much as he stole his own candy.
- keepamovin 3y ago
- INTPenis 3y agoIt's funny how this became a fad because it's really just mediocre chocolate with a bunch of aromatic addatives. I'm guessing they use whatever they can to make those flavors. I have tried one or two when they've been in a local store, but as a chocoholic it's sacrilicious.
- wyclif 3y agoIt's true it's not high-quality chocolate. The appeal seems to be to people who get into hobbies like this for the exclusivity or exotic nature of the items. The same kind of people who used to buy "limited edition" Supreme bling and then post it to Insta. Essentially hypebeast kiddies.
- alephnan 3y ago> In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraudulent trucks. This sounds like insurance fraud to me. Pure speculation, but if that’s what Bokksu wanted to do, they’d hire a middleman then claim deniability.
- bootloop 3y agoYea, I also think you are right. Something smells funny here. Question is if the insurance reads this article or is even interested to recoup their money.
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoMy luggage got "misplaced" in Amsterdam airport, returned 3 days later minus my japanese kit-kats. I complained to both my airline and the airport but was given the runaround, some bullcrap about removing organic matter, strangely they left the bag of raw onions.