Orion Cocoa Cigarette Candy

Cocoa Cigarette has been made by Orion since 1951 — seventy-five years on the same shelf, in essentially the same packaging, selling for what was originally five yen.

By 2012, cumulative sales had reached 210 million units.

Orion describes it as one of the three pillars of the company, alongside Mini Cola and Mini Sour.

The product is the reason the company exists in the form it does today.

The format is a cigarette — specifically, a candy stick shaped and packaged to resemble a box of Peace cigarettes, scaled down to dagashi size. Six sticks per box, each white with a brown tip, each about the length of a child’s finger.

The packaging reproduces the graphic language of a cigarette packet closely enough that the joke is immediately legible to anyone who has ever seen one, and innocent enough that it has been sold to children for the entire seventy-five years of its existence.

Orion’s current tagline on the packaging reads: “Better this than a real cigarette. Orion supports your journey to quit.”

The flavor is the combination that the original recipe established and never changed: cocoa and peppermint. The cocoa powder gives each stick a mild, slightly bitter chocolate note; the mint (hakka) produces a clean, cool finish that clears quickly.

The two flavors arrive simultaneously rather than in sequence, and the candy dissolves with a crunch that releases both at once.

The texture is the hard, compressed sugar tablet type — the same category as the Mini Series bottles, but denser and more compact in stick form.

Made in Toyama Prefecture. Allergen-free in terms of the 28 major categories.

The most famous dagashi in Japan that looks like something it isn’t, and has been getting away with it since the year Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty.

About this item
Item Name : Cocoa Cigarette
Brand : Orion
Item Form : Candy
Number of Items : 6 Counts (Pack of 1)