more kit kat history...

This will be it on the history lessons, I promise. From now on we'll stick to product reviews and such.

The Kit Kat has been manufactured in a number of localised versions for overseas markets such as Canada, Germany, Japan, and Australia. Kit Kat bars available in the United States are manufactured under license by The Hershey Company, a Nestlé competitor, due to a prior licensing agreement with Rowntree.

The Kit Kat is the world's #2 chocolate bar after the Mars bar. In the UK, Kit Kat is the number one brand both as a confectionery item and as a biscuit. In both the US and Canada, the Kit Kat is also extremely popular and is one of the top ten candy bar brands. In recent years, Kit Kats have also become very popular in Japan, a phenomenon attributed to the coincidental similarity between the bar's name and the Japanese phrase kitto katsu, roughly translating as "I hope you succeed!" This has reportedly led to parents and children buying them for school examination days as a sort of good luck charm. [However, transliteration is not always in Nestlé's favour - "kitto katto" (where 'katto' is taken to be a katakana transliteration of the English verb 'cut') is understood to bestow Kit Kat with the less positive significance of "you will definitely miss the cut". As such, gifts of a single kit-kat are a running joke for senior high school students taking the University Entrance Examinations in some areas. Further building on the teen market, Nestlé created a music label in 2005 and bundled Kit Kats with CDs which has propelled the Kit Kat to become the #1 selling chocolate bar in Japan as well.

The year 2003 was a turning point for the Kit Kat bar as well as the confectionery industry in general. The popularity of low carb diets and the push to healthier eating stifled sales growth in many parts of the world. In addition, fierce competition from Cadbury's newly formed Dairy Milk superbrand also contributed to sales of the Kit Kat decreasing considerably in its home market of the UK and threatening to dethrone it from its #1 position. The solution adopted by Nestlé and others was to dramatically increase the number of new and unique variations of their confections and market them as limited or special editions whereby they would usually only be available for a few months at a time so as not to impact the sales of their permanent edition counterparts. The strategy initially reversed the decline of the Kit Kat and has been adopted worldwide by Nestlé, Hershey, Mars and others with similar success. This has resulted in many new flavors and varieties of the Kit Kat and other confections appearing globally since then. While some flavors have been hits, many have flopped and have alienated some consumers causing Nestlé to scale back on new releases.