Walk into a Japanese convenience store later this month and one shelf will look strangely quiet. The bright red, yellow and gold bags of Calbee potato chips, fixtures of Japanese checkout counters for decades, will start arriving in plain black and white.
From May 25, 2026, Calbee Inc. will temporarily switch 14 of its products to two-color packaging. The bags will carry only monochrome lettering. Among the affected snacks are Calbee's potato chips, its lightly salted usu shio chips, and the Kappa ebisen shrimp chips, all of them supermarket staples in Japan.
The reason has nothing to do with snacks, and everything to do with a war thousands of kilometers away. The shortage at the center of the story is naphtha, a liquid refined from crude oil. It is a crucial ingredient: it is a building block for the plastics that wrap flexible food packaging and for the colored printing inks that decorate it.
Naphtha has become scarce because of the war on Iran. The conflict began at the end of February 2026, triggered by US and Israeli strikes on Iran, and it led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula is the single most important chokepoint for the world's energy trade. With it effectively shut, the oil and petrochemical flows that Japan depends on have been disrupted.
Japan is unusually exposed to that kind of shock. The country imports almost all of its crude oil and leans heavily on Middle Eastern supply, leaving its petrochemical and manufacturing industries vulnerable whenever Gulf shipping is interrupted.
For Calbee, the choice was simple. Colored ink had become a luxury the company could no longer count on. Stripping the packaging back to two colors is meant to help maintain a stable supply of its products. The change is described as temporary.
Calbee, founded in 1949 and based in Tokyo, is Japan's largest snack-food maker. Its chips and shrimp snacks are everyday purchases. That is exactly what makes the black-and-white bags so striking. This is one of the first highly visible, consumer-level effects of the conflict.