No strangers to food curios – fish ice cream more famously amongst them – Japan’s most northern island of Hokkaido is now gaining a reputation for packaged sweets with the oddest flavours.


Newly launched Genghis Khan caramels come with ‘added lamb’ and promises ‘a marriage of the sweet and a good bouillon’. In the meantime, squid-flavoured caramels assure that they are produced using only the ‘finest squid ink’, while the island’s famous ramen soup is now immortalised in Ramen-flavoured Candy.


The candies are sold as novelties to tourists who are, according to reports, sweeping them off the shelves at the island’s main airport at Sapporo for about JPY100 (US$0.90) a box.