This review can be summed up in one sentence. These cookie sticks are like Pocky, only with a slightly saltier cookie. That’s the simple way to sum these up, but when you think about it a little bit (and I do think about these things a little too much), this cookie treat might be a little more complicated. While I was in Korea (where I bought these) someone asked me what I thought of Pepero, and I said they’re like Pocky. I got a really dirty and disappointed look after saying that. This then turns to the question, are these actually different than Pocky, or is this just a case of pride with Korea people. There is a lot to unpack here.

To understand why this is a lot, you have to know that Korea and Japan are not the best of friends. They have a long history of fighting, wars, and general rivalry. Neither one of these countries would want to be less at anything, even snacks. So to compare Pepero and Pocky is kind of a sin. The problem is they’re very similar, I mean this in every sense of the word. The only subtle difference I could detect is a slightly saltier cookie stick. If we agree that these snacks are similar and throw away the rivalry, we have two more questions to answer.

The first question is, who made them first. I believe that Pocky is older than Pepero and the internet would agree. Pepero came out in 1983 and Pocky in 1966. Now we would next have to assume that the folks at Lotte probably saw Pocky and thought it might be a good idea to try and make it themselves. In other words, Lotte probably copied Pocky as opposed to it being an amazing coincidence that two candy companies made the same snack at the same time.

The second question we should answer is about the salty cookie. Is the Pepero objectively better than Pocky because of the slightly saltier cookie. This is obviously subjective because some people like salty and some do not. I’m going to go a little controversial and say that I prefer the slightly saltier cookie, but that’s mostly because the chocolate is so sweet. If it was a darker bitter chocolate I might have different opinion, but at this point it kind of balances out the flavour nicely.

I could have written this review in one sentence, but I dug a little and it got complicated. To sum up my argument, this is likely a copycat, so it’s not really that creative a treat (if Lotte can prove they didn’t copy Pocky I’ll rethink this), but the slight change that they made is actually an improvement, so a slight bonus on taste.