Swedish and Finnish gummies and licorice are an important part of European heritage
It was the packaging that got me. On a trip to Sweden about a decade ago, I noticed an attractive candy bar with a distinctive black-and-white diamond motif on the wrapper. Inside was milk chocolate, smooth and rich, hiding a molten core of jet-black salmiakki—Finnish-style salty licorice. “It’s like learning to drink coffee by putting milk and sugar in it,” says Niina Wredfors, the director of product development at a major Finnish candy company, and I know just what she means. I had found my chocolaty gateway into licorice culture, and there was no turning back. These days, I take my licorice like I take my coffee: black.
I’m not alone. Nordic candy culture—which encompasses not just licorice but fruit-forward gummy candies and other confections—is booming in the United States. And while it might seem unrelated to the New Nordic cuisine that boosted the reputation of Scandinavian food globally, the reality is more complex. Swedish and Finnish licorice and gummies represent an important piece of culinary heritage similarly rooted in local ingredients, know-how, and tradition.
“Since the 1980s, Swedes have been the world leaders in per capita consumption of sweets,” says Ulrika Torell, a food historian and curator at Stockholm’s Nordic Museum. And for anyone who’s spent time in Sweden, this won’t be a huge surprise. Swedish fruit gummies are sold in a kaleidoscopic array of flavors and colors; licorice comes in seemingly infinite variations and in several shades of black. The two also frequently converge in the same treat. They are available in what feels like every grocery store, market, and gas station; the same is true in Finland.
A few important factors set Swedish and Finnish fruit gummies apart from their global counterparts. “Our flavors are quite strong,” explains Wredfors, “and you really need to be able to recognize the berry or fruit in the candy,” she adds. “For the berries that grow wild in Finland or Sweden, the flavor profile is much more intense. I think it has something to do with our long, light summer nights.” And in the candy aisle, flavors like blueberry and strawberry are joined by the same types of foraged fruit you see on New Nordic dessert menus. “Everything that grows in our gardens and forests—black currant, gooseberry, rowanberry, rhubarb—we have them in our candy,” says Wredfors. “That directs our product development—trying to match those great flavors from nature.”
Another differentiator is the texture, which tends to be softer than gelatin-based candies often found in the U.S, thanks to the use of potato starch, corn starch, and wheat starch. This traditional practice also affects other aspects of candy-making. “When we play with starch, it’s super important to consider sweeteners,” Wredfors explains, noting that they have to complement the starch mixture. And in Sweden and Finland, the sweeteners can come from an unlikely place.
In many cases, sweetness comes from European Union-grown sugar beets rather than from artificial sweeteners. Not all Scandinavian candies are sweetened this way, but it is a commonly used method. “Sweden is self-sufficient in sugar from sugar beets,” explains Torell, “and it is used in the confectionery industry.” Leo Schaltz, the co-owner of a popular New York–based Swedish candy company, only uses beet sugar in his products. “It does taste different” from artificial sweeteners or even cane sugar, he says, “and it does taste better!”
Schaltz, who grew up outside Uppsala in Sweden, also uses natural coloring from beets, along with carrots and other ingredients. He traces the increase in organic options and concern for high-quality ingredients in candy to the tradition of lördagsgodis, or “Saturday sweets,” the result of a Swedish public health initiative in the 1950s that urged parents to limit their children’s candy consumption to one day a week. “If you’re only gonna have candy once a week,” he says, “you’re really gonna want to make it count.”
Finland had its own version of Saturday sweets in the form of karkkipäivä, or “candy day.” “But,” says Jukka Annala, president of the Finnish Salty Liquorice Association and author of a book on salmiakki, “one of the good things about being an adult is that you can eat candy every day.”
Annala’s association exists to promote the appreciation of salty licorice, which is popular in all the Nordic countries, but particularly associated with Finland. Originally brought to the region as a cough medicine and expectorant in the early 20th century, licorice quickly became popular as a candy. “The line between pleasure and medicine has always been blurred in the history of sweets,” Torell tells me, poetically. And licorice is a prime example.
In Finland, salmiakki differs from regular licorice (lakritsi) in that it’s made with ammonium chloride—a special ingredient with a characteristic ultra-salty flavor. It is somewhat divisive even among Finns, Annala explains. “There are people in Finland who don’t like salmiakki,” he says, “and you can get along with them too.” Wredfors is one of them—though as a sensory expert and food technology PhD, she appreciates it on other levels. “I think it’s something in our DNA,” she says, “this love of very strong flavors when it comes to candies.”
At the Salty Liquorice Association’s annual salmiakkigaala, or “salmiakki gala”—a title that’s meant to be understood with a wink—Annala and his fellow connoisseurs hand out awards to the finest salty licorice products they can find and, in his words, “just eat salty licorice very much.” Couldn’t that be every day in Finland? “Yes,” he tells me, “but I mean, like, very, very much.”
In Finland, salmiakki isn’t limited to the soft candies Americans would recognize as “licorice”—it comes in pastilles, in tablets, as a syrup to be poured over ice cream, and even as a flavoring for liquor. One of its most unique forms is a powder that is poured from its hockey puck–shaped container into the hand and licked. “If it’s a windy day, you have problems,” Annala says.
Despite the potential for more nationalistic impulses in appreciating salmiakki, Annala and his colleagues are licorice pluralists. Their association often gives out awards to Swedish products, and he is personally excited about the genre’s burgeoning popularity in the United States. Schaltz, for his part, notes that fruit gummies sell much better abroad, but as a licorice enthusiast, he is bullish on its prospects.
“Our salty licorice haselements of sweetness,” he says, “and if you approach it with an open mind, you can hit those notes too.”
In the candy aisle, I find that confectionery dovetails with another important tradition: Scandinavian design. Wrappers are graphic, nostalgic, and frankly cool. Newer upmarket brands echo the more minimalist trends in their sans-serif fonts and spare use of bright color. I can’t deny this is what pulled me in at first—but it’s what’s inside the wrapper that kept me coming back.
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