Halloween bowls everywhere are full of mini KitKats right now. So let's open one up, in the factory sense.
It starts with a giant wafer
KitKat isn't baked as little fingers. The wafers come out as big flat sheets. They cool down, get a layer of sweet filling, and are stacked on top of each other, a job robots do in Nestlé's Japanese factory. The stack, which workers call a wafer "book", is then cut into the familiar fingers.
Then the chocolate bath
The cut wafers are dropped into moulds already filled with melted chocolate. A second layer of chocolate goes on top, so every side is covered. The bars cool, set, and run off to machines that wrap them and even fold the boxes.
The famous secret
Now the gossip. What's that brown filling between the wafers? In a 2015 episode of the BBC show Inside the Factory, a worker explained it: bars that come out broken or ugly go into "rework". They're ground up and mixed with cocoa and sugar into the filling. So yes, there's KitKat inside your KitKat. Nestlé Australia later confirmed it. In the US, where Hershey makes KitKat under licence, the company just calls its recipe "proprietary".
Zero waste and extra chocolate. Honestly, the best kind of recycling.
How many?
The factory in Dubai, open since 2010, makes more than 2 billion bars a year. That's about 5,000 a minute, shipped to 26 countries. The original home in York, England, was already making around 3 million bars a day back in 2010.
A bar older than your grandma
It began in September 1935 as Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp and got the KitKat name in 1937. Nestlé bought Rowntree's in 1988. Japan then turned it into a craze, with around 300 flavours, partly because "Kitto Katsu" sounds like "you'll surely win". Students get them as good luck before exams.