There’s a wacky new diet product sweeping Japan, and it’s modeled after Willy Wonka’s famous Everlasting Gobstopper. Aptly named the ‘60-Minute Candy’, it’s a lollipop with a three-centimeter ball of sugar that lasts for an entire hour!

The 60-minute-candy has gone viral in the Japanese Twitterverse, with hundreds of women passing it on as a great way to suppress sugar cravings. A gigantic lollipop doesn’t really pass for diet food, but a few licks of it apparently beat gorging on a candy bar, and since it lasts so long it’s also more affordable.  Well, because it’s long-lasting, it’s actually great to suppress cravings for foods with higher calories. And they’re so handy that people could carry them around and take them out from time to time for a good lick.

The special lollipops are created using a special sugar hardening technique called ‘Ootama Marble’ that takes a good month from start to finish. Because they aren’t made with sugar syrup, like ordinary candy, they don’t melt at room temperature, so you can just keep them in your pocket and take them out when you need a fix.

Interestingly, the 60-Minute Candy has been around for decades. It was originally created in the 1970s as a snack for fishermen. Because they almost always had their hands full and were at sea for long periods of time, they needed something they could keep in their mouth that lasted a really long time. They only recently started advertising it to the general public, and it seems to have caught on.

And if the 60-Minute-Candy doesn’t remind you of Willy Wonka’s magical Chocolate Factory, check out Flat Nomura, the owner of the company that makes the lollipop. He seems taken out of a children’s book.

Source: Matome via RocketNews24