Around 10 p.m. on a recent Friday night, the line at BonBon in Manhattan’s Lower East Side was out the door. This isn’t an uncommon sight in the neighborhood — the queue for Double Chicken Please was visible across the street — but BonBon isn’t an acclaimed cocktail bar or a hot restaurant. It’s a Swedish candy shop, where people fill bags of imported sweet-and-sour gummies and salty black licorice and pay for them by weight. And unlike the city’s hottest restaurants, it’s been open for years.
While most shoppers in the United States likely associate Swedish candy primarily with red gummy fish, Sweden’s candy culture is vast, with Saturdays designated for lördagsgodis (“Saturday sweets”), a tradition of bringing children to pick-and-mix candy shops. Started in 2018, BonBon draws on this candy culture, offering mouth-puckering, grapefruit gummy shrimp and foamy-feeling, raspberry gummy ovals. It has three locations in New York City, all of them open until midnight.
On Friday nights, Marygrace Graves is one of the people stocking up at BonBon. Graves started the habit last year, initially on Sunday nights as part of her Sunday reset, and now she views the trips as part of a weekly practice of taking herself out on a date. That the store is aesthetically pleasing, with its bubblegum-pink bags and decor, is “part of the allure of making it part of my Friday night,” Graves says. Plus, she adds, “It’s luxurious candy.” When Graves posted a video of this routine on TikTok in early January, it blew up, getting over 1.2 million views.
For a relatively small niche — #swedishcandy pulls up only about 4,500 videos on TikTok as of this writing, compared to #girldinner’s 236,000 — Swedish Candytok has been influential. “Shop with me” videos and taste-tests have accrued views in the millions, and according to search interest data from Google Trends, Swedish candy is the most popular it’s ever been in the United States.
Since she started posting them in mid-January, creator Abigail Feehley’s chatty Swedish candy reviews have done especially well on TikTok. Although Feehley also makes makeup videos, her candy taste-tests are her biggest hits. In them, she tears and chews through different candies, while explaining their flavors and textures. Multiple posts have gotten views over a million, with viewers appreciating her level of description. “If it’s not in front of you, having someone describe it is like the next best thing,” Feehley says.
As with most food video content, there’s also a little ASMR overlap: Gummy candy lends itself to chewing sounds, which, as hated as they are by some, also have their fans. Feehley used to hate the sound herself, as well as seeing other people eat on camera, but having now been tagged in so many Swedish candy reviews, “I’ve leaned more into it,” she says.
TikTok popularity has real-world ramifications, and the uptick in interest in Swedish candy isn’t limited to any one brand — Los Angeles’s Sockerbit, Vancouver’s Karameller, and Toronto’s Sukker Baby all have disclaimers on their websites about longer delivery times as a result of increased demand. (Sockerbit and Sukker Baby describe themselves as Scandinavian, not just Swedish.)
The current trend has spurred BonBon’s fastest growth yet. This is the TikTok effect: Millions of new people become interested in a product or a new restaurant, literally overnight. Although local retail remains the company’s main source of revenue, the brand has also seen a boost to its national shipping operations. Leo Schaltz, one of BonBon’s three founders, attributes the current surge to Graves’s video. “The biggest switch from one day to the other was online, where we used to get maybe 20 or so orders [a day],” Schaltz says. “We got over 1000 orders the first day.”
The experience of running a suddenly TikTok-famous business has been “very humbling,” according to Schaltz. The company has run out of candy several times now, which is especially challenging since all of its candy is imported and all of its orders are packed by hand. Until now, candy has arrived from Sweden via ship, which is cheaper but takes longer. “In the last month when we’ve seen the surge, we’ve had to fly in candy on three occasions,” Schaltz says. There used to be one or two people handling and processing e-commerce orders; it now requires 15 people, six days a week. Still, some shoppers are complaining about the wait to get their Swedish candy. “I think overwhelming is the right word,” he says.
Since posting about it on TikTok, Graves has returned to her local BonBon. On one of these subsequent visits, she was shocked to see so many people there. For a second, she thought, What have I done? Then, in her usual ritual, she got her candy.
