The case of the missing Melona bars: Why the icy Korean treats are suddenly

Bronwyn Chhay runs an ice cream cart every summer at a Calgary park. Yet she noticed in July that one of her most popular treats — Melona, a creamy Korean brand of frozen dessert bar — was proving increasingly difficult to track down.

“We hadn’t been able to find them in weeks,” Chhay, the owner of ice cream sandwich brand D’Served, told CBC News. “The flavours started slowly disappearing and then there were no flavours, so we were running around everywhere looking for them.”

Once a delicacy found only in Asian specialty stores, Melona bars — available in a variety of flavours like honeydew, mango, pistachio, ube, coconut and strawberry — eventually became a Canadian grocery store staple and a dessert menu item at some restaurants. 

Chhay realized she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the sudden disappearance of Melona bars in Canada when she made a July 17 TikTok post about them. It now has almost 225,000 views, more than 17,000 likes and hundreds of comments from users lamenting the fact they could no longer find the brand.

Where had the popular ice pops gone? On its official Instagram account, Melona Canada told a user who’d inquired about the treats that the disappearance was temporary because they were “currently experiencing shipment delays.”

In a Facebook post, the brand’s distributor said Melona fans could soon expect a non-dairy version of the bars on Canadian shelves. 

But why Melona bars disappeared in the first place was still a mystery. Could it all really be chalked up to shipment delays? CBC News reached out to several government agencies and the Canadian importer to find out what happened to the treats.

Rumours of a dairy dispute

On social media, rumours swirled about taxes and mislabelled dairy products and disputes between Melona’s parent company, Korean food giant Binggrae, and Canada’s dairy commission — the first ingredient in a classic Melona bar is listed as milk. 

A Reddit thread about the disappearance of Melona bars in Canada indicated that the treats were still available at some stores, but not others where they’d been stocked in the past.

The Canadian Dairy Commission, which deals with public policy related to dairy products in Canada, referred CBC News to other agencies.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which manages food product labelling and safety, said it had no record of complaints or food safety investigations related to dairy labelling of Melona products.

A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), which administers customs tariffs, noted that while it couldn’t share company names or details, importers are responsible for correctly classifying the goods that they bring into Canada, and for paying any duties and complying with regulations set by the agency.

Global Affairs Canada, which controls import and export permits, told CBC News that Binggrae supplies its products to “allocation holders” under what’s known as a tariff rate quota (TRQ).

When…