Saturday, September 24, 2011

Crazy in Candyland

Boy the Swedes take their candy seriously. Did you know Swedes eat the most loose candy in the world? Pretty sure I've posted about the Swedish Candy Obsession in one of my earlier posts but it bears repeating. If there's one thing that's relatively cheap here in this country, it's candy.

Every grocery store has a wall of candy bins. The idea is to take a bag and fill up on loose candy from said bins, everything from Swedish fish to chocolate, gummies and more. The stuff's delicious I gotta say. The germs, with so many hands reaching in and out, are overlooked. Especially on Saturdays. Known as "Lördagsgodis" (Candy Saturdays), it's the day of the week set aside for kids (and their parents) to indulge guilt-free.



Candy is typically priced at around 79 SEK / kg (Thanks to Thomas for the correction in measurement). I've seen it on sale for 49. Well, today, they were celebrating something at our local supermarket. On a neighbour's referral, we took a trip for some shopping, pony rides and face painting (though Little Man decided at the last minute the make-up wasn't for him). Cheap Saturday entertainment. Little did I know that as part of the celebration, candy was on sale for a record 29.20 SEK/ kg. This is big folks.

People were swarming the candy bins, multiple bags in hand. Shuffling quickly back and forth between the scale to ensure they weren't over the 5kg limit per household. Staff were trying to keep supply in line with demand. It was insanity. Ok, insanity as far as a candy sale is concerned. Certainly not on the riotous scale of the recent sale at Target for some brand name that I think begins with the letter "M". But it was chaos as far as orderly Sweden is concerned.

Karamell Kungen (Candy King) is the name of arguably the best loose candy company here in Sweden. Actually, looks like this phenomena isn't a Sweden-only thing. I see the company also operates in Ireland, the UK and other Scandinavian countries.

Well time to pick some more plastiky goodness out of my teeth.

Glad Godis Lordag!



2 comments:

Thomas said...

Just a small correction. I am assuming the price was 29.90/kg, not hg. Otherwise it would be very expensive.
1 kg = 1 kilogram = 10 hektogram (hg)

SwedishJenn said...

Thanks Thomas. I went back and forth between hg and kg and even Googled and couldn't find the unit. Will change :-)