Surface revision is not cultural understanding.
Nearly two decades ago, I saw this packaging in a Nordic supermarket. I was a Japanese designer living in Oslo, temporary relocated from NYC, and I remember thinking: someone made a deliberate choice here.
The brand has since updated its look. The caricature is gone. But the visual logic underneath, the red and yellow, the chunky outlined type, the shorthand signals that say oriental, remains intact. The revision was cosmetic. The assumptions were never touched.
This is the gap that concerns me. Not brands that haven't updated, but brands that believe they have.
The product is named after a country. It has no meaningful connection to that country's food, culture, or craft. The name and the aesthetic exist purely to connote exoticism, a visual shorthand that was already a simplification when it was created, and hasn't been reconsidered since.
My kids see this in supermarkets. They are Norwegian and Japanese. They are precisely the people this aesthetic is meant to evoke, and it bears no resemblance to how they experience their own identity.
Western design has learned to remove the most visible offenses. What it hasn't learned is how to replace the underlying assumptions with something that reflects lived experience. That requires more than a packaging refresh. It requires cultural proximity, either designers who have genuinely inhabited the cultures they're representing, or the discipline to bring those people in before the brief is written.
Fazer is not the target here, they are the example. And that distinction matters, because the problem isn't one brand's packaging. It's an industry that has learned to revise the surface while leaving the assumptions underneath untouched.
Surface revision is not cultural understanding. As designers, we are often not equipped to know the difference. That, more than bad intention, is the problem worth solving.