Treats Box May 2016 Review & Coupon – Sweden!

May’s Treats Box explored the fabulous snacking culture of Sweden!  Treats is a monthly snack subscription full of snacks from around the world.  You can expect to receive eclectic and interesting snacks that you’ve never sampled before (unless, of course, you’ve lived in the featured country recently)! The Standard Pack offers 4-5 snacks, while the Premium box offers 8-10. You’ll get your first box within a few days when you subscribe.

The packaging is simple and elegant.  Tissue paper keeps the contents a surprise, and nice introductory postcard welcomes you to your Treats destination — this month welcomed us to Sweden with a snapshot of Reindeer Sledding, a favorite Swedish activity.

The curator’s note pointed out some of the items with distinctly local and traditional character.

The handy card give gives the name and maker of each treat, with a translation from Swedish when appropriate.  A short description of each snack is also given.  Take the link to the Treats site to learn more about each item.

Everything in the box.  The composition of each Treats collection depends on the local snacking culture, but there is usually a good mix of cookies or baked goods, small candies, and chocolate/caramel/marzipan or nougat, etc.  I love the sizing on the items — there are always several multi-serving items, and often you receive several family-size packages.  We’ve had what seemed like big-box-store sized items before, but this batch was less comically large.

Mondelez Marabou Mjolkchoklad Milk Chocolate Confection:  This is a straight up milk chocolate bar.  It is sweet and creamy — though it is smooth in texture it tastes like it has a hint of peanut butter and caramel (though no nut products are listed in the ingredients).  The texture is much lighter than a waxy, Hershey style bar, more like a Cadbury product.

Cloetta Kex Wafer:  The most popular bar in Sweden, a triple-layer buttery and crispy wafer with chocolate creme between layers, all smothered in a thin blanket of chocolate.  The wafer itself has a wonderful flavor, making this my favorite simple wafer bar.

Panda Raspberry Licorice Bar:  Panda licorice is probably unlike any you’ve seen.  It is light in color and relatively light in density for a licorice.  It has a fairly mild flavor that is equal parts raspberry and licorice — a bit Twizzlerish.

Lakerol Raspberry Lemongrass Pastilles:  I’ve seen these in a menthol licorice variety before, and this combination is much more inviting.  They are slightly tart, with a super dense texture, like a jujubee.

Bizarre looking for a licorice, the approachable flavor is good for licorice novices.

Made in Slovakia, this flavor of Lakerol is a much friendlier pastille than the very Nordic licorice-menthol variety they also produce.

Daim Crunchy Caramel Candy Bar:  This is the Swedish version of the Heath bar, cooked up when Hershey refused to license the Heath bar in Sweden.  This slightly darker version is more flavorful and has a better quality chocolate coating — it became popular enough that an American company copied it and named their bar Skor to sound Swedish.  This crunchy “caramel” bar is better described as a toffee.

Cloetta Guld Nougat Bar:  It appears to be a fluffy chocolate bar, but it is a creamy and sweet hazelnut and chocolate nougat.  It tastes remarkably like a Ferrero Rocher crunched all at once.  Mmmmm.

The creamy Guld is credited with being the first mass produced nougat bar, and it still holds up!

[Note from Brandy: It’s like eating solid Nutella!]

Ahlgrens Bilar Fruktkombi Fruit Candy Bars:  These are a strange, but very tasty, hybrid of a gummy and a marshmallow candy.  The marshmallow is slightly chewy, and the gummy portion can’t really be distinguished from it.

They contain apple, elderberry, and radish juice.  It’s difficult to discern if these flavors are really represented in the candy — I thought I could taste them separately, but the Lakerol also has this same peculiar trio of juices, leading me to think it may be of general utility in Sweden as a pectin, sugar, and tartness natural additive for gummied confections.

These are “cars.”

Goteborgs Ballerina Choko:  Chocolate cookies sandwiching rich chocolate creme, with a dollop that also pokes out the top.  They have a great, surprisingly dark chocolate flavor.

Annas Ginger Swedish Thins:  These things are great!  They have a pumpkin pie spice flavoring more than just straight ginger, and they have a great crispness.  Perfect with tea or coffee!

Hellas Licorice Pipe:  Talk about one-upping the candy cigarette!  This variety of licorice has a very intense molasses flavor and a bit of menthol, but not much licorice.  Dense and dry, but very tasty!

Treats is one of our very favorite discover-foreign-foods boxes because every item is appealing (nothing too weird included merely for shock value).  Scandinavian and Low Country boxes can often be very licorice heavy, but Treats maintained the broad appeal of this box by only including a couple exemplars, both of which had unique flavor profiles and were, thankfully, not salted.  Kudos for that!  There was lots of good stuff in here, so we were very pleased.  We like to get the premium pack, because we hate to miss out on some of the great finds we won’t see otherwise!

Have you tried Treats yet? What did you think of the box? You can save 15% on your first month with coupon code HELLO15.

Visit Treats to subscribe or find out more.