This Swedish Candy Fails On The Flavor Front

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While you might be familiar with Swedish meatballs and cardamom buns, Swedish candy is also a huge part of Sweden's culinary and social culture. It's even gaining traction with U.S. candy lovers for having fewer preservatives, less artificial coloring, and more vegan-friendly ingredients — all things that make Swedish candy different from American candy. While chocolate is consumed in Sweden, most Swedish candy encompasses a wide variety of colorful, sweet, and sour gummies. Tasting Table imported, tasted, and ranked 21 popular Swedish candies to see what the hype was all about. 

And, while many of the Swedish candies lived up to the Swedish candy craze, one candy decidedly failed on the flavor front. We ranked Haribo Nappar as the absolute worst popular Swedish candy. Haribo is a German-born company that offers plenty of delicious flavors and whimsical shapes in products including Happy Cola, Berry Clouds, Goldbears, and Happy Cherries, all of which appear in a separate and exclusive ranking of popular Haribo gummy candies. Meaning "pacifier" in Swedish, the Nappar candies are shaped like pacifiers and come in various fruit, marshmallow, and cola flavors. 

The Haribo Nappar flavor chosen for this tasting was licorice, and it was decidedly not the right flavor to choose. The licorice flavor was not only intense, but oddly salty. A salty, herbal licorice taste on top of an excessively sticky texture was difficult to process. The taste tester could only stomach one jet black Haribo Nappar before happily moving on to the next type of candy. If you're a licorice lover, there are numerous other Swedish candies that received glowing reviews.

Nappar, the pacifier-shaped gummy candy, is a popular and playful shape that's popular in Swedish culture. And you can find other brands offering the same shape in different flavors; Haribo also offers fruit, cola, sour, and marshmallow Nappar. If you aren't keen on licorice but want to try the fun shape, Haribo Kinder Schnuller is available on Amazon. Along with the nappar shape, licorice is another treasured flavor that hasn't quite caught on stateside. 

Swedes are such big fans of licorice that they offer different intensities and kinds of licorice flavors. The Haribo Nappar, for example, is known as saltlakrits, or salty licorice in English. Salty licorice is made with ammonium chloride to give it that salty aftertaste that did not go over well with our taste tester. You won't find salty licorice in most U.S. candy stores; even conventional licorice gummies are hard to come by. However, in Sweden, licorice and numerous other lösgodis, or loose candies, are consumed on a weekly basis. 

In fact, Swedes have a designated day of the week to get their sweet fill. The Swedish tradition of lördagsgodis (Saturday sweets) came about in the 1950s and continues to be a family affair as adults and kids gather to delight in a bag of sweet treats. While the weekly tradition of candy eating hasn't caught on stateside, the bulk-section candy shop format certainly has. Our list of the best candy stores in the U.S. features many with pay-by-weight candy bins, including BonBon, a Swedish candy company based in New York City.