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Bloomberg
European chocolate lovers are about to get an injection of Japanese culture, as Nestle SA’s green-tea matcha KitKat launches on the continent.
The confectionery brand will begin to sell the green chocolate bar in Europe this month, 15 years after it was created in Japan. The blend of imported green-tea matcha powder with cocoa butter and white chocolate will be made at Nestle’s factory in Hamburg. It will be rolled out initially in eight countries, including Germany, the UK, Italy and Switzerland, before going wider. Japan’s $5 billion chocolate confectionery market is Asia’s largest, according to Euromonitor International, and it is KitKat’s most popular. The green-tea matcha bar lands in the top three favorite of its 350 products in the country. Globally, KitKat accounted for more than 1 billion Swiss francs ($1 billion) of Nestle’s 8 billion francs in confectionery sales last year. It has an organic growth rate of nearly 9 percent, exceeding Nestle’s total confectionery growth of 3 percent in 2018.