KZBlog

The other day I got hungry, it was hot in Astana, and I thought an ice cream bar was just the thing. And then I saw it in the freezer at Gros and had to buy the USSR Ice Cream bar. It wasn’t anything fancy, just vanilla ice cream with a chocolate coating. Perhaps it was an attempt to pick up the popularity of that song that was popular a while back, “Я сделан в СССР” (I was made in the USSR). I could make endless jokes about how the chocolate coating was cracked into little bits, or how cheap it was, but I won’t bother.

Then the other day, I noticed an unusual new series of chips from SMAK, a Kazakhstan based snack food maker. Including horsemeat-flavored (the package says kazi-flavored) as illustrated on the left. They also had pickle-flavored, fish-flavored, onion and fish-flavored, and caviar-flavored. At first I thought this was a bit silly but then I realized that most Kazakhstany buy chips or snacks to accompany drinking beer or vodka. And kazi, pickles, fish and onions are all popular accompaniments for drinking. So go SMAK for trying to be a bit innovative and give the customer and interesting experience. Also, Kazakhstan surely will be the world leader in horsemeat flavored snacks. For the record, they weren’t bad. They tasted much like any other fake meat flavored snack, but there was a hint there of something kazi-like. I still prefer the real thing, to imitation but if one must have faux-horsemeat, these are the way to go!