Viral tweet suggests Japanese convenience store ripping off customers with donuts, so we investigate

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Photo shows Family Mart chocolate donut looking nothing like its packaging, but was that by design?

It’d be an exaggeration to say that Japan’s love affair with its convenience stores is over, but the relationship isn’t quite as rosy as it used to be. Over the last few years, the trend has been towards rising prices, shrinking sizes, and an overall lower level of satisfaction among shoppers. In some cases, major convenience store chains have come under fire for deceptive packaging or presentation that critics say misrepresent what’s really being sold, and the latest one to find itself in the crosshairs is Family Mart.

Family Mart’s Chocolate Old-fashioned Donuts are a consistent best seller, and a constant presence in the chain’s pastry aisle. Priced at 135 yen (US$0.90), they’re a remaining light of hope that we can still have inexpensive, delicious treats, but that perception took a major blow when the following Japanese Twitter post went viral, claiming to show a Family mart Chocolate Old-fashioned with hardly any chocolate at all.

That post went up on April 23, and the amount of chocolate on the donut is in reverse portion to how upset it made sweets fans. But is Family Mart really trying to shortchange/shortchoco its customers to such an egregious degree? To investigate, we made the solemn decision to go out and buy a bunch of donuts.

We came back to our testing center with 10 Family Mart Chocolate Old-fashioned Donuts, sourced from four different branches, in order to get a broader picture of what’s going on.

Obviously, making donuts isn’t like assembling cars, so we’re not going to be holding Family Mart to industrial engineering-caliber standards of uniformity here. The photo on the packaging for their Chocolate Old-fashioned Donuts, though, shows chocolate covering about half of the donut (way more than in the above tweet), so that’s the amount we’ll be looking for.

Let’s get started with our first three test subjects.

We’d call all of these acceptable. Sure, there’s some variance, but nothing shockingly off from the target of 50-percent coverage, even if the uneven upper surface of the donut means that there are gaps sometimes.

Let’s open up four more.

Again, nothing stands out here as anything that makes us think we’re getting scammed. That last one, in particular, looks like it’s got chocolate covering more than half of it, so if anything, Family Mart’s package is underselling that individual example.

OK, now for the last three.

As you can see, out of the 10 donuts we tested, none of them looked significantly different from what Family Mart promises through its packaging, and none of them were even close to the choco-deprived donut shown in the viral tweet.

About the only room for criticism is that the chocolate here is a covering, not a coating, in the sense that it’s primarily on the top of the donut, and doesn’t really wrap around the side or bottom surfaces.

However, there’s no law or confectionary compact that says a chocolate donut has to have an all-sides coating, and the packaging itself only shows it on top.

So if our testing shows that Family Mart’s donuts really do tend to have as much chocolate as promised, what’s going on in that tweet? Assuming the photo is genuine and the donut undoctored, it would seem, to be the result of some sort of production process error. Since Family Mart currently only sells Chocolate Old-fashioned Donuts (there’s no plain version), should you happen to end up with one with so little chocolate, the best thing to do would be to take it back up to the counter and show it to the clerk or manager and ask for a replacement, since it’s a fluke of some kind, and not a case of Family Mart actively trying to rip you off.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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