Foreign Candy Puts American Candy to Shame

I'm not sure I buy the premise of the title per se, but there is great foreign (as in non-American) candy out there. Not that that's surprising, as great food is everywhere.

I've noticed foreign sweets are a great way to encourage kids who might otherwise be averse to novel foods to trying things that are unfamiliar to them. Kids who would probably never try unfamiliar ingredient X will gladly try it if in a candy (I think a related phenomenon are "gross" candy flavors, like vomit-flavored jelly beans).

What I was curious about was how things got this way.

> Meanwhile, Bouzari told me, major U.S. manufacturers haven’t really kept up. They depend on appealing to as broad a swath of the country’s atypically diverse population as possible—not just across racial and ethnic lines, but across the country’s many local and regional food cultures. The results are candies that tend to be highly sweet and pretty bland, forgoing flavors and textures that brands believe might alienate white Americans in particular.

I get the sense that this is only part of the difference in methodology and results.

Over-sweet and no flavor. That applies to other treats like Krispi-Cremes, too. I tried those once, but never again. Just too sickly sweet.

The European chocolate brands Milka and Cadbury are now owned by the American Oreo-maker Mondelez—

And the taste and quality of those brands is dropping through the floor. I don't buy Cadbury any more, I buy one of the (still) European brands instead.

Everyone knows American sweets are the worst. So sugary, very little flavour. The chocolate is borderline disgusting.

I brought a pack of “runts” from a specialist store a few weeks back and they are beyond bad. Literally just sugar with bad flavourings.

I can't scroll on this website, so I can't read the article (except of the first few lines when switching to "Desktop Mode" in Firefox in Android).

Smells like some weird scroll-jacking implementation or so...