Famima’s newest fried chicken and potato chip flavor is also Famima. For convenience stores in Japan, the ideal situation is to provide customers with both familiar favorites and new eating experience

Famima’s newest fried chicken and potato chip flavor is also Famima.

For convenience stores in Japan, the ideal situation is to provide customers with both familiar favorites and new eating experiences. Those might seem like opposite objectives, but one way to have it both ways is to offer special-flavor variants of items that are already proven hits. You’ll see this often with convenience store fried chicken. If a chain’s regular version is selling well, maybe they add a version with the flavor of chili peppers, black pepper, or magical Final Fantasy crystals.

So it’s not a shock that convenience store chain Family Mart has announced a new flavor of its popular Famichiki boneless fried chicken. What is surprising, though is that the new Famichiki’s flavor is…Family Mart?

Officially, the flavor is called “Famima Taste,” but Famima is the fan nickname for Family Mart, and also the name of the chain’s new-concept flagship store that just opened in downtown Tokyo’s swanky Toranomon neighborhood. Making things even more mysterious is that Famima Taste, which is also going to be a flavor for potato chips and rice crackers, isn’t just one flavor, but a series of three flavors that transforms on your taste buds as you eat.

Family Mart describes the Famima flavor as starting out with a refreshing spiciness, thanks to yuzukosho, a spicy chili paste made with yuzu citrus fruit. Famima Taste then transitions to its “mellow” phase of mayonnaise. Then comes the final phase, which Family Mart is still keeping under wraps, with the only hints being that it’s spicy and “That flavor you know, which symbolizes Japan!”

▼ A chart of intensity over time for the three phases of the Famima flavor

Putting on our fried chicken prognosticator hats (yes of course we have such hats, and* of course* they have feathers for stylish flair), the identity of the secret stage-three ingredient seems pretty easy to guess. Indigenous Japanese cuisine doesn’t really have that many spicy ingredients or seasonings, and one of them, yuzu kosho, is already filling the role of the first flavor in Famima Taste. Among the remaining possibilities, shichimi, a cayenne pepper-like piquant powder mix, isn’t quite prevalent or famous enough to be widely considered a symbol of Japan, and while some types of miso are spicy, most of them aren’t. That leaves wasabi as the most likely candidate for Famima Taste’s final component, and considering that wasabi is sometimes used as a condiment for yakitori (grilled chicken skewers), it wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on fried chicken, and wasabi-seasoned potato chips have a fanbase in Japan as well.

With the Famima Flavor items now on sale at Family Mart branches, we will, naturally, have to test this theory as soon as possible.