If your social media feed has suddenly filled with pastel skulls, fizzy gummies, and enormous bags of pick-and-mix sweets, you’re not imagining things. Swedish candy is having a serious moment in the U.S.What began as a TikTok-fueled fascination around 2024 has developed into a much broader candy craze, with Swedish sweets appearing in specialty shops and increasingly in mainstream American stores.
So, what makes Swedish candy different? For starters, it’s all about variety. Swedish candy culture embraces gummies, intensely sour candies, licorice, chocolate, and especially skumgodis, or foam candy, which has a soft, springy texture somewhere between a gummy and a marshmallow. Flavor combinations can also be unexpected: raspberry and salty licorice, banana and toffee, pear, cola, wild berries, and plenty of puckery fruit flavors.
Authentic Swedish candy is also often vegan (check the labels) and generally avoids synthetic, petroleum-based artificial dyes (like Red 40, Yellow 5, or Blue 1). Instead, Swedish candy makers rely on natural colorings derived from plants, fruits, and vegetables, like beet juice.
Then there’s lösgodis, Sweden’s beloved pick-and-mix candy tradition. Instead of committing to one bag of one candy, shoppers scoop individual candies from rows of bins, creating a custom mixture sold by weight. It’s closely connected to lördagsgodis, or “Saturday candy,” the longstanding Swedish tradition of making candy a special weekend treat.
The brand currently getting the most American attention is BUBS, founded in Sweden in 1992 and famous for its skull-shaped candies and distinctive soft-chewy foam texture. The company’s entire range is vegan, too. Other Swedish names worth knowing include Malaco, known for gummies and licorice; and Ahlgrens Bilar, famous for tiny foam candies shaped like cars.
But Swedish candy has something going for it beyond novelty: it’s fun to shop for. Choosing a little of this and a little of that turns buying candy into an activity, while the range of sweet, sour, salty, chewy, and foamy options makes every handful different. It’s colorful, nostalgic, highly shareable, and just unfamiliar enough to feel like a discovery.
In other words, Swedish candy may have TikTok to thank for introducing it to a huge new audience, but the candy itself is doing a pretty good job of keeping everyone interested. The one downside to this trend? It can be hard to come by. Importation of these candies is expensive, and those prices are passed along to the consumer, meaning they’re not worth stocking for a lot of U.S. candy stores. Today, you may be able to find the biggest brands at stores like Target, but you can also look online or search for brick and mortar Swedish candy stores near you.
