When I was a kid, I got my allowance on Saturday mornings and would promptly zip to the corner store, spend 20 minutes trying to optimize the amount of candy I could get — always a fine balance between candy bars and sour gummies — and spend the rest of the day reading YA fiction and giving myself a stomachache.
It seems I wasn’t the only one. Louise Schönberg grew up in Sweden, where Saturdays are called lördagsgodis — literally, “Saturday sweets.” (According to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, the average Swede consumes 17.9 kg of candy each year, second only to the Danes.)
“It’s a tradition that people grow up with in Sweden. When kids get their allowance, they bike to the convenience store and spend their allowance on bulk candy,” she says.
Schönberg and her husband Luis Giraldo own Karameller in Yaletown. From the outside, it’s not immediately clear what the shop is, with its white walls, blond wood floors and theatrical black lights dangling from the ceiling. But as soon as you approach the beveled white shelves and plastic bins filled with bright colours, it becomes clear. It’s a candy store.
There are gummies in every imaginable shape (monkeys, skulls, racecars), chocolate-covered everything (nougat, cereal, gummy bears) and all manner of sour, squishy and chewy. Everything is imported from Sweden and is free from GMOs, trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup.
“The high-fructose corn syrup is one of the bigger things people notice,” says Giraldo. “So often you have this overwhelming sweetness in [North American] candy, but with the Swedish candy, the flavour comes out.”
Wait, the flavour of candy? You bet. The red candies, for example, are mostly raspberry and strawberry flavoured, but the red Swedish fish are flavoured with lingonberry. And many of the gummies have a distinct chew to them, like a softer, less sticky taffy.
As if it couldn’t get better, there are the Swedish names for the candies. Mouse-shaped gummies are geléråttor (jelly rats), marshmallows are vit kubik (white cube) and corrugated red licorice is smultron matta (wild strawberry carpet).
“I always recommend the sour candies because that’s what people tend to like,” says Schönberg. “I’m drawn to the chocolate. We have a marshmallow banana covered in chocolate which is to die for, we have the corn crisp [corn cereal covered in chocolate] and there’s a chocolate-covered gummy bear.”
Giraldo’s more experimental. “We have one called ‘Going Bananas’ that’s a banana-shaped marshmallow that’s sour on the outside but it doesn’t taste like a banana. I mix one of those with a red Swedish fish and they taste amazing together.”
Since opening the store in July, the couple is still trying to figure out which candies sell and which ones don’t. One of the most divisive pieces is a smiling licorice octopus. The malt-coloured, sour powder-dusted gummy packs a punch. First it’s sour, then salty, then unabashedly licorice. I spit out my first bite, but five minutes later, nibble on the octopus some more. Maybe it’s not so bad.
“We’ve had lots of people ask us to take it away,” says Schönberg. “But then people come in and buy a $10 bag of just the octopus because it’s their favourite.”
If you visit, it’s likely to be Schönberg or Giraldo behind the counter. They’ve lived in the neighbourhood for the past 10 years, making Yaletown a natural place to set up shop. “I love being able to go to the coffee shop and know the baristas by name,” says Giraldo. “And it’s becoming really fun to have that experience with people coming into our store.”
Karameller is located at 1020 Mainland St. Contact: 604-639-8325. karameller.com.
thewelltemperedchocolatier.com
@eagranieyuh
