Swedes love sweets. So when an American TikToker sparked a craze for Swedish candy this year, there was pride that an important part of national culture was being recognised around the world. The Danes may have Ozempic but the Swedes have lördagsgodis – Saturday sweets – where families chew through more than 1kg of sticky treats in an evening.
That pride has given way to some irritation. Supplies of some Swedish sweets ran dry in the autumn due to the high demand in the US, South Korea and in Scandinavia. And there was another factor, an equally important Swedish tradition: the six-week summer holiday.
“The trend started to really increase during the spring but unfortunately we didn’t have enough safety stock before the summer,” said Niclas Arnelin, a director at Orkla, maker of the Bubs sweets which are now in short supply.
“During summer, we need to let people in the factory have their vacations by law, and we also close the factory for maintenance. We sold everything we produced over the summer. And after that we ran out.”
Bubs was forced to reduce to a “much slimmer assortment”, he said, reducing the number of types of sweets it makes in order to ramp up supply. Machines need to be reset to make different sweets, eating up production time, so focusing on just three lines allowed them to meet demand. Just about.
The craze began when Marygrace Graves, a New York marketer, filmed herself visiting BonBon, a confusingly-named Swedish sweet shop in Brooklyn, and indulging in some pick’n’mix – a pastime that is unfamiliar to most Americans, according to Arnelin.
Millions of views later, BonBon now has queues outside and Americans have adopted the term “candy salad”. A new firm, Skandy, is offering weekly deliveries of sweets in Britain. In Sweden, Bubs are being rationed out to shops in a Sweden-first policy and Swedes are asking visitors to see if they can find any at home.
“We have Bubs,” said Jonas Aurell, who runs ScandiKitchen in central London. “Like everyone we were struggling to get hold of it, but we work with the supplier.”
Aurell and his wife, Bronte, opened ScandiKitchen 17 years ago, partly because they were missing lördagsgodis.
“I couldn’t get my kilo a week,” he said. “Our main market is Scandinavian expats – when you’re homesick, the idea of getting some sweets is obviously a big thing for us.”
Lördagsgodis is an extension of another Scandinavian concept, lagom – not too little, not too much, says Bronte Aurell. “We’ve been brought up that you eat sweets once a week,” she said. “It’s alright to pig out, but you only do it once a week.”
As a Dane, Bronte prefers to do things slightly differently. “We do it on Fridays,” she said. “But it’s basically the same all over Scandinavia.”
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The tradition began in the 1950s when the Swedish medical authorities were trying to combat rising tooth decay and said sugar should be eaten just once a week. The idea is now a cherished part of the culture.
“Lagom means you have a balance, you have personal responsibility,” she said. “If I’m going to have a cardamom bun for lunch, maybe I should have a salad for dinner.”
Downstairs at ScandiKitchen, the pick’n’mix display is tended by assistant manager Freja Haulrik, another Dane, who makes sure that the Salta Katten (salty liquorice cats), the Vattenmelon (watermelon jellies) and Amerikanska Pastiller (chocolate buttons) are properly arranged.
“It’s looking pretty good,” she says. “Over the summer we had no delivery for six weeks. You’ve caught us on a good day. Although,” she frowns and points at the box of liquorice chalks, “there are two liquorices next to each other.” She shakes her head. “You have to space it out.”
