Bissli is a snack food made by the Osem corporation, Israel's greatest snack food makers, most famous for bamba.

Unlike the flagship product, which is sweet, soft and marketed towards children, Bissli is salty, quite crunchy, and marketed towards teenagers.

I live in rural Montana, very far from Israel. There is a store in my town specializing in odd, assorted merchandise that fell off the back of a truck, and from time to time large lots of Israeli junk food show up. Having been previously rather impressed by Bamba, I was quite intrigued to see the little packages of Bissli. I figured that this was some Israeli equivalent of a corn or potato chip...which is not far wrong. Although it is wheat derived, it still fits in the basic niche of a salty, crunchy snack. The main difference between our American corn chips and Bissli is that while an American corn chip is a wide, diffuse and structurally unsound thing that rewards the virility of our teeth with easy crunching, Bissli is more compact and much harder to chew. They are dense, hard little things. But just like American corn chips, the eagerness with which I go through the package is somewhat out of proportion to the actual enjoyment I receive from eating them.

They also have, in keeping with their marketing to teens, a pair of mascots. The mascots are two teenage boys, made to look like what I assume an Israeli marketer thinks of as "cool". And to paraphrase Seanbaby, "cool" is a very difficult concept to capture, especially if you are an Israeli snack food marketer.

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