Okay so during halloween, there are these weird eyeball gummies that are not only unsettling to look at, but they also taste like sugary plastic. It’s by far the worst tasting candy I’ve ever experienced, including low quality black licorice and some weird wood bark candy.
Lucas Limon - I never understood how kids could eat. Even before they found lead in it.
NECO wafers. Like cardboard they taste
Swede here.
Some American candy, mostly bad chocolate
Durian candy and sour milk candy share the top spot.
Can’t stand corn fructose and palm sugar based snacks. Terrible everything - engironmental impact, texture, health impact, flavor. It’s just the cheapest possible option that ruins everything it touches.
The cheap no name “chocolates” that taste like eating oil solids disguised as chocolate
I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.
That sounds delicious what
I need to find this
Related anecdote: When I worked an offshore rotation with people from all over the world, I made an effort to bring candy that I’d never seen outside of Scandinavia. It was always amusing to see people sampling candy I liked when they weren’t used to the ammonium chloride branch of flavors.
And once I brought this:
Everybody who weren’t Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish (sadly we had no Danes on board) absolutely hated it. Especially the Americans and Brits.
Everyone except Mario, that is; a Croatian geophysicist. He loved them. His voice still lives rent free in my head over ten years later, saying “Sweet candy is for kids”
A few trips later I brought one of my favorites for basically the same result, but this time with Jim (from Illinois, iirc) complaining that it made his mouth physically hurt:
Mario loved that one even More.
The only thing everyone on board liked was the obscene amount of chocolate my navigator brought every trip.But to answer the question: Twizzlers. I bought some when visiting the US a couple of years ago. It tasted like oily sweetener (as in, clearly not actual sugar). That’s when I learned that American and European wine gum are flavored very differently.
Footnote: Durian and durian chocolate is quite alright once you get used to the slight farty smell from each packet you open.
i cant stand the smell of durian candy, its way to pungent.
Take a bag of those pebers and dump them in a bottle of vodka. Let them dissolve overnight. Bring to a party and you will be instant friend of any scandinavian.
Substitute vodka for some quality moonshine for extra bonus points from us northern scandinavians.
Stop this. This is how poison like Malort is made. We dont need to create its successor.
Yeah, American candy has about the lowest standards. Canada isn’t much better, but there’s a noticeable difference in the quality of chocolate in common chocolate bars. We once did a side-by-side comparison of KitKats (we live right on the border) and the difference was stunning.
milk chocolate by any of the big chains, are just trash. at WF, they sell gourmet chocolate imported from outside the US, or they make the ones that are bougie and expensive. dark chocolate, not so sweet is the best. white chocolate seems to have a chemical smell and aftertaste to it, super synthetic, that has no chocolate i never liked the taste.
If you like KitKat, try and see if you can find this one:
.
It’s similar, but better.One American candy I actually like is Reeses peanut butter cups.
Reese’s is one of my favorites too, but objectively it’s horrible, down there with hersheys chocolate. They successfully made it addictive, rather than taste like peanut butter or chocolate. Try something like a Trader Joe’s peanut butter cup and it’s a world of difference.
It won’t keep me from my Reese’s but at least I’m aware of it
Reese’s tasted a whole lot better 20+ years ago. Now it’s just gritty sugar with peanut butter flavored ‘essence’ added. Same goes for Cadbury eggs which are completely inedible now.
alot of cookies and cakes are like that, you can feel the granular sugar, because they put so much.
I always wondered about that but I don’t eat frequently enough to notice when it changed
Eating them infrequently is exactly how I noticed the change especially with the Cadbury eggs. It used to have a creamy center that has been replaced with what tastes like a spoonful of gritty Betty Crocker sugar frosting. Reese’s are less obvious but also just taste like sugar (or HFCS) to me now and they were my absolute favorite as a kid as someone who’s not really into candy.
Will do once I’m in the US, although I need to figure out an explanation for the vast collection of JD Vance memes on my phone first.
I try to be as anti-Nestle as possible, which meant giving up KitKat, my favorite candy. I found these a few years ago on norwegianfoodstore.com and they’re soooo much better.
Damn, I wish that site existed when I lived abroad.
I love this site! I only order from them once a year because it’s expensive (I usually ask for a gift card for Christmas), but they have so much awesome stuff. The paprika Pringles are to die for.
My first thought was that this is terrible ai lol.
Well, it could be (I just grabbed it off of an image search), but the product is real and found all over Norway.
Ah so ai isn’t bad at words, its just writing Norwegian!
We once did a side-by-side comparison of KitKats (we live right on the border) and the difference was stunning.
Bad comparison on that one. KitKat brand in the USA is an entirely different company that the rest of the world. So they aren’t even the pretending to be the same recipe.
At least the US KitKats aren’t Nestle.
I won’t say I’m boycotting Nestle per se, but I try to avoid their stuff. There’s a bag of strawberry cheesecake KitKats from Japan on my desk, lol. They’re pretty good.
I will defend my rubber flavoured twizzlers til the day I die. Do they taste like you shouldn’t be eating them? Absolutely. Will I still eat an entire bag of twizzlers at the movie theater every single time? You betcha.
I’m a brit and have loved tyrkisk peber and other “salty” liquorice etc. sweets for a long time. I had a big bag of the hot and sour flavour and was rather sad when I ran out.
If you feel like DMing your name and address to an internet stranger who may or may not send you anthrax spores, I can (claim to) mail you a resupply stash on Monday.
Same in Canada. Everything is fake. You’ll see transmission fluid before you’ll see any real sugar in the ingredients.
American or South African chocolate products.
NOT an anti-American/-Saffer thing. They add butyric acid, which tastes like vomit to the rest of the world. (Accurate, as vomit contains it).
Presumably because the market there have been trained to expect that flavour for some reason. To the rest of us, a US or ZA origin is usually a sign to avoid.
That reason is because Hersey chocolate was the first chocolate the common American could afford and the processing method that Hersey used to produce it would create butyric acid from the milk. Now they add it back in because customers complained when they refined the process.
While in American, in right there with you. Aldi fortunately imports a good selection of chocolate so not all of us have to suffer.
Aldi has such awesome chocolate! Thanks for pointing out the reason.
I tried to like the Aldi chocolate bars but they leave this strange fatty coating in my mouth after eating them. I don’t experience that with other brands.
We usually get things like the chocolate covered cashews or sea salt caramels. They occasionally have some peanut butter or maybe cashew butter cups and those I remember being really good.
Those Choceur bars are pretty good. My favorite treat are Droste pastilles but the aldi bars will do.
That explains a lot, thanks.
Oh my God is that why I taste vomit if I eat a Hershey’s bar then drink a glass of water
A colleague came back from the US with a big back of mini Hershey’s flavours. Most were ok but I legitimately thought the standard plain flavour had spoilt.
It may have. Certainly one of the many problems with hersheys s how old it can be. It seems to be treated as something that can sit on the shelf forever
I tried Hershey’s (American chocolate) before and it tasted absolutely disgusting. it will never ever come remotely close to Dairy Milk or Galaxy
Hands down absolutely nothing worse than peeps. They somehow manage to make twizzlers taste like ultra gourmet candy.
I’m curious, do you like marshmallows?
I like peeps, but also love marshmallows
Plain marshmallows on their own are fine.
Hersheys “chocolate”. I spit it out, and a bit embarrassed, asked “could it gone bad during the flight?”
Well, obviously this stuff does taste like vomit, and Americans seem to be OK with that. Explains a lot about American behavior. If chocolate here would taste like that, we probably would have more mass shootings, too.
Hersheys used to be our only choice. However now that we have better choices, many of us are waking up to chocolate as a good thing (other than the sugar rush). It can be hard to get over the price and quantity difference though.
Luckily, we are spoiled for choice here. German, Swiss, Belgian, English chocolate all around. And no Hersheys anywhere.
the good ones are pretty expensive, and most people dont buy them, they have imported bougies ones sold by WF.
I got a monthly food box for my wife a number of years ago. Each month they sent snacks from a different country.
I can’t remember which country it was from, but one month we got some round, hard candies. It was one of the most unfortunate things I have ever intentionally put into my mouth.
I don’t even remember the flavor (licorice, maybe?), because my brain attempted to bleach it out.
Everything else was usually tasty, though.
My wife looked it up. It’s a hard licorice candy with a salty filling from the Netherlands called Napolean Zwart-Wit (which loosely translates to “tarred scrotum”).
That may have been one of the Scandinavian countries. Sorry.
If you have any leftover, plz send.
Edit: Not our fault this time, but thanks for the tip!
The Harry Potter bean things which has awful flavors mixed in, like puke etc.
