"Instead of only children, we started to think about what we could sell to people in their 30s, 40s or 50s."
Masakatsu Ishimori, Tokyo branch manager of Osaka-based confectioner Furuta Seika, can vouch for the commercial advantages of packaging toys with candy. By appealing to adults with neat collectible figurines, his company is enjoying a boom in sales that would otherwise be almost certain to shrink in line with Japan's declining birth rate.
Furuta's best-known product is Choco-Egg -- an oval of candy that encases a capsule containing detailed plastic figurines of animals, birds, fish, amphibians or insects -- some 280 different items in all. The company has sold more than 100 million eggs since launching the product in 1999.