Kabaya Foods Corporation (カバヤ食品 Kabaya Syokuhin) is a Japanese confectionery company. In business at least since the 1960s, they are well known for their candy toys: a variety of figurines, model kits and other widgets that come packaged with a variety of different candies and gums. And they make a lot of them, with boy-oriented products alone ranging from plastic dinosaur kits to a broad variety of LEGO properties to Transformers toys and merchandise, the most widely-known being their many kits that usually replicate scaled-down versions of larger figures.

Kabaya's relationship with Transformers began in the Generation 1 era, when they consistently produced figures and model kits of various size from 1985 to 1990. The dawn of Beast Wars saw the relationship reignite in 1997, and continue through Car Robots and the Unicron Trilogy. There was another pause in releases after 2005's Galaxy Force assortment, but Kabaya returned to the Transformers brand yet again in 2009, with a series of Generation 1 themed products being released up until 2016 and Transformers Adventure products also being released in 2016. Unfortunately, there hasn't been another been another line of Kabaya kits since.

Generation 1

As mentioned, Kabaya is best known for their snap-together model kits, which were released in two separate series: the small-scale, single-color Transformers Choco, and the larger, multi-coloured Transformers Gum series, the latter being the premiere line for which Kabaya is most widely recognized. Both types of kit were fully transformable, but the Gum kits went the extra mile by preserving many of the gimmicks from the original toys they were based on.

Kabaya also released a variety of soft rubber figures (similar to the Decoys, a type of figure known as keshigomu in Japan) through their Transformers Caramel and Transformers Ramune lines; Ramune was also home to a variety of other candy toys, including PVC figurines and keychains.

When Generation 1 surged in popularity in the early 21st century, Kabaya got in on the nostalgia act with a series of "bottlecap" figurines. Later, they revived Transformers Gum to celebrate various eras of the Generation 1 franchise, spinning it off into a separate lines of candy toy models dedicated to new characters.

Beast Era

The formula employed during Generation 1 was faithfully replicated during the Beast Era, with the assorted Gum and Choco lines offering variously-sized model kits. Later waves of the Gum series along with the numerous Ramune lines offered fully-painted PVC figurines, while the Beast Fighters and Beast Battler lines took things in a super deformed direction.

Car Robots

The lines produced for Car Robots were all quite small, with only the Transformers DX figures being capable of transformation.

Unicron Trilogy

Model kits were fully abandoned for the Unicron Trilogy product line, in favor of a wide variety of transforming miniature figures, and PVC figurines.

Adventure

• Transformers Adventure Gum

Notes

• This is actually the most extensive English-language article about Kabaya Foods on the internet, sadly.

External links

• Kabaya homepage (Japanese)
• Checklist and gallery of Kabaya Transformer kits
• Kabaya at Wikipedia