A global shortage of Swedish sweets, all thanks to a viral TikTok video? Stranger things have happened.
But that's exactly what happened earlier this year when TikTok influencer Marygrace Graves showed her followers the sweets she scored during her weekly visit to BonBon, a Swedish bakery in New York City.
“It's a strawberry squid. I'm drinking them for the first time in my life, they're delicious,” Graves told her followers in a January video, as if she was telling them a secret.
Well, the secret is out — and other TikTok users started making their own videos of the Swedish candy, resulting in millions of posts, a viral Internet phenomenon, and an ongoing global shortage of the country's prized sweet.
Graves' viral message from the original video said some of the candies were frothy and others felt like her teeth were going to break, she said. Some were oddly shaped, including a jelly rat that she held by its tail; and many of them had unique flavors, such as sour raspberry-lemon gel, which she approved, or grapefruit candy, which she found made her feel sick.
All of them were imported from Sweden, a country famous for producing high-quality sweets.
According to Michelina Jassal, owner of the Swedish candy store Karameller in Vancouver, what makes Swedish candy special is that it is based on unusual forms and flavors, away from the additions typical of North American sweets.
“No GMOs, no corn syrup, usually (fewer) ingredients than conventional sweets you find in the grocery store,” said Jassal of Scandinavian Sweets. “You don't quite get the nauseous (feeling) you sometimes get from eating conventional candy.”
The shortage sent Canadian importers scrambling for supplies.
Jessica Borchiver, who runs the Swedish online candy store Sukker Baby out of her home in Toronto, says an increasingly impatient (and increasingly American) customer base has been urging her to restock a particularly popular brand: Bubs Godis.
What was previously a steady business for Borchiver grew rapidly overnight. But the run at Bubs “turned everything upside down,” she said. “Everyone who was anyone wanted to have a hand in it.”
Swedish candy producers give priority to customers from Scandinavia
Bubs Godis is one of the largest Swedish sweets companies. As demand skyrocketed due to the sudden virality, the company was forced to stop accepting new international customers, a policy that had been in place since late December. During the summer months, when the annual six-week factory vacation began in Sweden, the company ran out of supplies.
Any company would be pleased with the sudden increase in international interest. However, the creators of Bubs decided to take care of their people first.
“We have a long-standing relationship with our customers in Sweden and the rest of the Nordic countries,” said Niclas Arnelin, director of international expansion at Orkla, the Swedish food and snacks corporation that owns Bubs. “And we need to prioritize them now.”
They may also be their best customers – Swedes have a notorious weakness for sweets and eat up to 16 kilograms of sweets a year, according to a spokesman for Business Swedish, a government- and corporate-owned organization that promotes Swedish exports.
The country has a long tradition of the so-called Saturday sweetsor “Saturday sweets,” where families gorge on sweets. This custom began as a result of research conducted in the 1950s by medical researchers who discovered that dental health in society would improve if the consumption of sweets was limited to one day a week.
Stockholm resident Linda Rose remembers when the custom became popular. She performed a similar ritual on Fridays with her own children.
But if the sweet tooth community is currently experiencing a global shortage, Swedes have been spared the pain.
“There is no shortage here,” she said. – None.