Nestlé / 20th century
Nestlé, Japan and the story of an acquired taste
1:24 / A short film by Chirag SpeaksWatch on YouTube
Why do some tastes feel like home while others feel unfamiliar? This early film explores a widely circulated account of Nestle using coffee-flavored sweets to build familiarity in Japan. It raises a useful question about memory and habit, while the historical explanation needs more care than a short story can give it.
The question to take with you
What memories does someone bring to a product before they ever try to choose it?
A closer look at the history
A case-study account, with limits to what we can establish.
Nestle's Japanese company history records the expansion of Nescafe and domestic production beginning in 1966, following coffee import liberalization in 1961. Japan's coffee market already had its own history.
The coffee-candy explanation in the film is a widely repeated marketing anecdote. The company history linked here does not establish that it caused Japan's coffee-market growth. Treat that causal account as unverified.
Read the film transcript
From the published automatic captions, with names, spelling and punctuation cleaned. The history notes above provide context for the original narration.
Japan had a curious relationship with coffee in the 1960s. It was visual, but not habitual. And Nestlé thought that a country that loved tea would love coffee, but they were wrong. So, they brought in a psychologist who uncovered a deeper truth. People were not rejecting coffee, and they didn't always necessarily love tea, but they were solving for something else. Welcome back to The Stories They Told: How Brands Have Shaped the World episode four. The psychologist believed that every taste lives inside a code, a memory that shaped earlier in life.
And for Japanese consumers, tea was a childhood habit. It was an excuse to sit down with family and friends. Coffee had no emotional hook in their past. There was no smell in the kitchen, nor was there any taste or memory tied to family. So, Nestlé decided to go backwards. Now, instead of starting with coffee, they began to flood the market with coffee-flavored candy, like Kit Kat.
Within a single generation, Japan became one of the strongest coffee markets in the world with vending machines, convenience stores, canned coffees, at-home brews, and all of these were thriving. Now, coffee didn't arrive in Japan through persuasion. Instead, they brought it over with familiarity, which was seeded years earlier with something as simple as candy. This playbook, we ended up knowing it as flavor bridging, but the lesson was pretty clear. If you want to change a habit, you start by shaping the memory that's behind it.
I'm Chirag, The Brand Historian, and in our next story, we're going to learn how four words changed the rules of romance for an entire generation.
Where would you like to go next?
