A golden treasure box that glows from the inside out!

It’s getting to be that time of year again. Hong Kongers and others in this part of the world must buy cheap (but not too cheap!) premium foreign chocolate products to give as gifts. S. and I recently bought a box of Cadbury Glow chocolates, for our own consumption. Verdict: perfectly alright, but neither of us were left with the precious feeling promised on the back of the packaging.

Our cozy little golden treasure box contained sixteen individually wrapped, slightly-smaller-than-thumb-sized chocolates, manufactured in Slovakia for export to Malaysia, Brunei, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Cadbury is also pushing them in India and, most likely, other developing-world nations. To see a cross-section of one of these morsels, check out one Singaporean blogger’s review: Cadbury Glow – Premium Chocolate Gifting.

We’d never noticed them until our neighborhood supermarket debuted its Christmas-slash-Chinese-New-Year candy-to-gift aisle endcap display, but it seems that at least in Singapore and India (links are to country-specific Cadbury marketing videos on YouTube), they’re being pitched as wedding/relationship anniversary gifts.

Did you catch the golden glow playing over the faces of the actors in both of the afore-linked commercials as they unfold the golden cardboard box containing their chocolates? It’s like the Nazi-face-melting effect of opening the Ark of the Covenant, but much milder. Just enough gold to wow you but not so much that your face liquefies and drips off your skull.

In the words of a different Singaporean blogger, For someone opening such a box for the first time, I must admit that there was undeniably a ‘wow’ factor. It’s Cadbury like I’ve never known it to be. It’s now… what’s the word… ATAS!. Atas is a Singlish word which is usually used to describe something of high social status or someone arrogant.

In the photo above, note the golden-ish color of the cookie boxes (emblazoned with an even golden-er, dare I say coin-shaped, circle motif. The Malteser boxes’ design gives a single split Malteser center stage, to show off its yellow-but-counts-as-golden honeycomb core, and features a golden ribbon and bow … and a faux gift tag because the manufacturer wants to remind you that they are perfectly serviceable gifts! If you hope to sell inexpensive-to-manufacture, mass-produced consumables in Asia at a hefty mark-up, you’ve got to literally go for the gold, at least on the product packaging.

The hundred pound gorilla of the Asian gold-festooned-foreign-edibles market is Ferrero Rocher (see Why are Chinese crazy about Ferrero Rocher chocolates?) and Cadbury Glow seems to be a relatively recent contender in the perennial quest of non-Ferrero-Rocher confectioners to take a bite out of their sales.