Glico Pocky Chocolate Almond Crush

Some ingredients are best when they appear more than once.

Almond Crush Pocky is built on that principle.

Where the standard Pocky Chocolate works a single ingredient through a single layer, this variety introduces almond at every level of the snack — in the chocolate coating, in the pretzel beneath it, and in the textural contrast that makes each bite more interesting than the last.

The result is not simply a Pocky with almond added. It is a Pocky in which almond is the organizing idea, expressed three different ways at once.

The chocolate coating comes first — and it comes with almonds already inside it.

Coarsely crushed deep-roasted almonds are folded into the milk chocolate before it is applied to each stick, so that every bite encounters a fragment of nut suspended in the coating: a brief, firm resistance before the chocolate yields, carrying with it the specific toasty depth that only a properly roasted almond can contribute.

The deep-roasting is not incidental; it pushes the almond’s natural oils toward the surface, intensifying the fragrance and adding a faint bitterness that sits comfortably alongside the sweetness of the milk chocolate.

Beneath the coating, the pretzel carries the idea further.

Almond praline paste — roasted almond ground with sugar into a smooth, intensely nutty concentrate — is worked directly into the whole wheat flour dough at 0.6%, a small proportion that nonetheless gives the baked stick a warmth and fragrance that a plain wheat pretzel does not have.

The whole wheat flour adds its own slight earthiness, and together with the praline it produces a base that is already interesting before the chocolate arrives.

The finish is clean and nutty, with a lingering roasted note and the natural vitamin E content of the almonds contributing 1.2mg per pack alongside the dietary fiber from the whole wheat.

At 129 kcal per pack and two packs per box, it is one of the more textured and satisfying entries in the lineup — a Pocky that rewards the bite rather than simply delivering it.