Anticipating the follow-up question, "where can I buy Pocky?", try a local Asian food store if you have one (which is where I get most of mine now, from a few local stores) or check out on line stores -- I've bought from Pocky from both YesAsia.com and AsianMunchies.com before. JapaneseSnacks.com may also be a good place for information. The places you buy anime are other places to check -- some sell snacks, too. You probably won't be able to buy all the flavors you hear about though. As I understand it, some flavors are only available in certain regions of Japan and thus rather rare while others are limited time, seasonal releases and still others are tested in more rural markets and might never make it to big city markets. But don't worry, you should still be able to find a good variety to choose from if you look around.
So why do I have this page? Well, when I went to buy Pocky for the first time I realized that web sites didn't tell you the number of sticks in a box. Sometimes you'd get more than one package in a box, but they didn't tell you how many sticks were in each pack. Serving sizes aren't counted in numbers of sticks, but I was still curious and you probably know that nutrition information isn't always the best indicator of quantity, especially when the serving size is measured by weight instead of by number. (BTW, Pocky is a snack food and thus not especially healthy, if you didn't guess.) So I decided to count and put the information up here. This is only from my limited, personal experience, so I don't know if this is 100% constant -- I'd kind of hope so, but you never know -- but it should give you a pretty good idea of how many sticks of Pocky you'll get in any size box. I've given the numbers for what I've bought, but with the sticks/pack number you can calculate the total for any other number of packs/box. If you're like me and want to know how many sticks you get in each box, then I hope you find this information useful. I've also added a few brief comments about the different flavors I've tried. I hope these will help you decide what flavors you might want to try. I'll try to add more flavors as I'm able to buy them.
| Flavor | Packs/Box | Sticks/Pack | Sticks/Box | My Comments |
| Almond (Cream) | 2 | 19 | 38 | kind of mild flavor, some tiny bits of almonds |
| Almond Crush, Cafe au Lait | 4 | 6 | 24 | has a coffee flavor, lots of almond bits |
| Almond Crush, Mild Chocolat | 4 | 6 | 24 | lighter chocolate flavor, lots of almond bits |
| Chocolate | 2 | 19 | 38 | standard milk chocolate |
| Chocolate Crush | 7 | 4 | 28 | milk chocolate with lots of almond bits |
| Chocolate Crush / Cookie Crunch | 7 | 4 | 28 | milk chocolate with Oreo-like cookie pieces |
| Chocolate, Giant Size | 24 | 1 | 24 | standard milk chocolate, bigger version |
| Coconut (Chocolate) | 2 | 8 | 16 | {notes to be added} |
| Decorer Mont Blanc | 4 | 3 | 12 | coffee dip heavily striped with milk/cream |
| Decorer Purely White | 4 | 3 | 12 | chocolate dip heavily striped with milk/cream @ |
| Decorer Strawberry Gateau | 4 | 3 | 12 | seems sim. to strawberry mousse heavily striped with milk/cream # |
| Dessert | 4 | 3 | 12 | white chocolate dip? heavily striped with chestnut cream |
| Dessert Chocolate Cake | 4 | 3 | 12 | chocolate dip heavily striped with dark chocolate |
| Dessert White Mont Blanc | 4 | 3 | 12 | milk chocolate dip heavily striped with chestnut chocolate |
| G Hard & Rich | 2 | 12 | 24 | mine looked like a milk chocolate coating with dark chocolate dots on it and a crunchier (maybe chocolate) stick + |
| Gokuboso Chocolate | 2 | 22 | 48 | standard milk chocolate, very thin sticks |
| Kinako | 4 | 8 | 32 | soybean flavor;
to me, it resembles peanut butter % |
| Kurogoma | 4 | 8 | 32 | black sesame flavor slight nutty flavor % |
| Marble (Mild & Bitter) | 3 | 4 | 12 | milk chocolate dip, coffee flavor stripes ? |
| Marron | 4 | 6 | 24 | chestnut flavor |
| Men's Chocolate | 2 | 19 | 38 | dark chocolate, sort of bittersweet flavor |
| Milk / Cream | 1 | 17 | 17 | a sweet milk/cream, almost vanilla flavor |
| Mousse Black and Latte | 3 | 5 | 15 | coffee flavored dip, milk chocolate stripes * |
| Mousse Blueberry Yogurt | 3 | 5 | 15 | * |
| Mousse Chocolate | 3 | 6 | 18 | * |
| Mousse Green Tea | 3 | 5 | 15 | * |
| Mousse Mango Milk | 3 | Y | Z | * |
| Mousse Strawberry | 3 | 5 | 15 | * |
| Mousse White (Chocolate) | 3 | 6 | 18 | white chocolate dip, milk chocolate stripes * |
| Strawberry (Cream) | 1 | 19 | 19 | kind of mild flavor |
| Strawberry (Fudge/Tsubu) | 4 | 8 | 32 | has bits of strawberry, slightly thicker coating |
| Tahitian Vanilla | 2 | 10 | 20 | vanilla flavor |
# Many thanks to a friend I met at ballroom dances who brought this back for me
when she took a trip back home to Japan. I appreciate her thoughtfulness.
@ Thanks to a Japanese pen pal who sent this to me (along with some other food
and snacks). It was very kind of her, and I returned the favor with a gift
package of food and snacks from here in the US.
+ I don't know if the G Hard & Rich flavor is supposed to be dark chocolate
dots on a milk chocolate coating. It doesn't look that way in pictures so I
expected a smooth coating. I did order this over the summer so it may have
had some slight damage because of the heat. The sticks did stick together in
this and other packs so maybe the dots were discolorations of the chocolate
due to heat. *shrug*
% According to the box, these are considered healthy flavors. There used tto
be a web site for them at
http://healthy.pocky.ne.jp/, but it
appears to be down now and I don't know of a replacement.
* A few extra notes: all the Mousse flavors have dips that are kind of light
and fluffy in texture (they are mousse after all), but there is more of it
than on the regular flavors; that is, while the standard flavors have a rather
thin coating, the mousse flavors have a thicker coating. The mousse flavors
also tend to be on the mild/light side, they're not particularly strong.
On the Decorer flavors, I'm kind of assuming that the white stripes are
milk/cream and not, for example, white chocolate. It's hard to get a good
taste of the stripes alone though, so I'm not certain my assumption is correct.
Personally, I found the Giant Chocolate pocky to have way too thin of a coating for the size of the stick; it's about twice as long and thick (measuring the diameter) and yet the chocolate coating seems about as thin as it is on the regular sized sticks. I don't think I'd get this one again -- not enough flavored dip per stick, IMO. I suspect other giant size flavors (I've seen strawberry) are the same way and I probably wouldn't buy them either.
This page has been visited times since March 31, 2009. Free counter courtesy of PHPJunkYard.com.