Strange sweet flavours from around the world

Most sweets stick to fruit, mint and chocolate. Around the world, though, some flavours are designed to surprise, and a few are designed to disgust.

Japan's Kit Kats

The Kit Kat has gone a long way in Japan. Nestlé tries to appeal to local tastes, and it has introduced more than 300 flavours there since 2000, including hot sauce, soy sauce, wasabi, apple cider vinegar, zunda, milk tea and cough drop. There has even been a range meant to be baked in an oven.

In Japan, Kit Kats are often bought as good luck gifts, because the name sounds like kitto katsu, which roughly means surely win. In 2020 Nestlé launched a Scotch whisky Kit Kat, sold only in Japan, made with chocolate aged for six months in whisky barrels in Scotland.

In Britain, by comparison, the first flavour variant was Kit Kat Orange, in 1996.

Jelly beans that taste of vomit

Jelly Belly, the Californian jelly bean maker, is known for unusual flavours: buttered popcorn, chilli mango, egg nog, pancakes with maple syrup and a licensed Tabasco bean. Some flavours, such as lychee and green tea, are sold only outside the United States, and its flavours based on alcoholic drinks, from Mai Tai in 1977 to a draft beer bean in 2014, contain no alcohol at all.

Then there are the beans made to be horrible. Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, inspired by the Harry Potter books, include vomit, earwax, skunk spray, rotten egg and grass. BeanBoozled goes further, pairing beans that look the same but taste very different, such as peach and barf.

Salty liquorice

In the Nordic countries, the Benelux countries and northern Germany, a common sweet is liquorice flavoured with salmiak salt, or ammonium chloride. In Sweden, the most popular types contain an average of about 7% ammonium chloride. The Finnish writer Jukka Annala suggests it may have started in pharmacies that made their own cough medicine, since ammonium chloride was used as an expectorant: see how is salt liquorice made? and what is Swedish pick and mix?

British oddities

Britain has strange flavours of its own, even if they are familiar here:

• Pear drops, which smell like nail varnish: see why do pear drops smell like nail varnish?
• Parma Violets, flavoured with violet, a floral taste people either love or compare to soap: see Parma Violets
• Rhubarb and custard, a pudding turned into a boiled sweet: see rhubarb and custard

For how flavours get into sweets in the first place, see how are sweets flavoured?

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