(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- January is normally a slow month for candy sales. The holiday rush has come and gone. People sweep their pantries of excess sugar, resolving to have a healthy new year.
But for the handful of US businesses selling Swedish candy, the first month of 2024 was anything but quiet. Leo Schaltz, a co-founder of BonBon, a chain of stores in New York City that sells colorful gummies, licorice and chocolates imported from Scandinavia, couldn’t believe his eyes in mid-January when his phone told him there were 1,000 online orders waiting to be fulfilled, way up from the usual handful. “It was bizarrely many. I thought it was something weird,” he says.
The source of the order explosion was a short video that influencer Marygrace Graves posted to TikTok. In the clip, Graves described her weekly ritual of going to a BonBon location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a bag of decadent multicolored treats, which cost $18 a pound. In a dimly lit video shot inside her apartment, she shows off the contents of her gummy haul—strawberry squids, sugar skulls and sour shrimp—while chatting about her preferences. “I like the ones that you feel like you’re gonna break your teeth on,” she says.
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Within a couple of days, her post had more than a million views. When Graves returned to BonBon on a Friday night two weeks later, she found a “mob scene.” Customers were waiting hours in line to experience the premium candy for themselves. “It's like in Willy Wonka,” Graves says of the fascination with the Swedish sweets. “You're like, I want to eat that. What is that?”
Six months later, the craze shows no sign of slowing down. TikTok has flagged more than 120 million videos as Swedish candy reviews, a form of content popularized by the candy’s rise to fame this year. The platform also has a host of “candy salad” videos where the sweets are poured into bowls and used as storytelling props (including, less cheerfully, for “trauma dumps,” where creators share painful childhood memories with each mixed-in candy). People have also been vlogging about their experiences shopping at BonBon, whether walking into the whimsical pink exterior or loading up their bag with a rainbow of sweets. “This has to be the most hyped thing I’ve seen in New York City yet, and I was so excited to try it,” says one creator as she walks into an Upper East Side location in a video that got more than a million views.
Businesses are racing to keep up. Schaltz says the number of daily orders has grown fifteenfold since January, and he’s had to hire dozens of people to accommodate demand. But the craze has overtaken BonBon to include other purveyors, including Los Angeles’ Sockerbit, Toronto’s online-based Sukker Baby and Sweetish, a Swedish candy shop in the Amish mecca of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There, owner and founder Tyler Graybeal says he’s had to expand his team from 12 to 26 to fulfill the onslaught of orders. In February, both Sweetish and BonBon warned on their websites of 12-day shipping delays because of demand. And both companies say they have air-shipped hundreds of thousands of pounds of candy directly from Sweden, forgoing the cheaper but slower option of shipping by sea.
“We just couldn’t wait any longer,” Graybeal says.
Nordic candy suppliers are also feeling the crunch. Anyone in the US trying to buy Bubs—a particularly popular brand that makes oval-shaped gummies in flavors such as banana-caramel and sour pear—may soon be out of luck, says Niclas Arnelin, business manager at Orkla ASA, the Swedish company that owns the brand and stopped exporting to any new customers in February. “We say no to basically everyone,” he says. “We don’t have enough candy.” To keep up with orders, Orkla is working to expand its factory in Jönköping, Sweden, this summer and fall, Arnelin says, with the idea of eventually building a plant in the US.
Influencer Abigail Feehley, who’s posted dozens of TikTok videos about Swedish candy since her first in January, credits the virality of the sweets in part to their aesthetic appeal. With each video, Feehley holds pieces of candy close to the camera so viewers can see their texture firsthand, down to the grains of sugar. She tears through sour skulls and strawberry oval Bubs and describes the experience in detail. (“It tastes like a fizzy Coke,” she says of a cola-flavored skull in one video. “I’m not exaggerating. I think this is the best candy I’ve ever eaten.”) The novel flavors draw in viewers, Feehley says, as does the candy’s high price. “It’s so different from going to your local gas station and buying Skittles,” she says. “It feels like you’re eating something luxurious.”
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The ingredients are also generally of higher quality than the usual cash register fare. Most Swedish gummies are vegan, gluten-free and allergen-friendly, and their sweetness comes mostly from sugar instead of corn syrup. And there’s a nostalgia factor: Despite the relative novelty of Swedish candy for American consumers, these videos transport viewers back to the familiar feeling of being a kid in a candy shop, Feehley says.
That pay-by-weight Swedish candy is available in such a diversity of forms stems from a beloved tradition in Sweden: Lördagsgodis, or “Saturday candy.” To curb rising tooth decay, in the 1950s, Swedish doctors started recommending limiting sugar intake to once a week. What started as a medical recommendation turned into a decades-old social institution that finds parents taking their children to shops and malls to pick out their candy mix every Saturday.
For America’s Swedish candy lovers and purveyors, every day is now Lördagsgodis. Graybeal says he has customers who tell him they’ve driven as long as six hours just to visit Sweetish and that his small-town store is still packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Asked if he’s run ads on TikTok or Instagram, he replies, “We’ve not put a dime into it.” The growth has all been organic.
Graves, the influencer who posted that first video, has some regrets about the long lines she now has to brave to get her weekly fix from BonBon. But she’s resigned to the idea that her favorite treat now belongs to the internet. “It’s become more than candy,” she says.
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--With assistance from Charles Daly.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
