I believe I’ve mentioned this before in the past (maybe many times), but I’m not a huge fan of black licorice. In the past I might have even said that I hate black licorice, however, I’ve been spending a great deal of effort to build a taste for it. The main way I’ve tried to build a taste for it is just by eating it, but what I’ve learned eating black licorice is that when you mix it with other flavours it can actually be kind of good. Milk chocolate is probably the most successful treat that improves licorice. I assume it has similar qualities as adding sugar and milk to coffee, it takes the edge off and smooths everything out.

This leads me to this gummy treat, it doesn’t use chocolate to smooth out the black licorice burn, but instead tries to use fruity gummy instead. I assume that the fruit flavour is “hallon”, but I can’t say my Swedish is good enough to know what that is. The fruity flavour does improve the black licorice, but only to a point. After a few bites you’re hit with a fairly strong black licorice flavour that starts to dominate the entire candy. It’s as if someone tried to play a trick on your mouth by saying, here’s a nice fruity treat, enjoy! The thing is, in a few minutes your mouth is going to be filled with a flavours that you’re not too keen on.

If they could somehow balance out the fruit and black licorice flavour a little better this might have worked well. At this point it’s just a hint of some kind of red fruity flavour (it almost tastes like red licorice), but just when you think things might be okay your blasted with black licorice. I imagine if you happen to like black licorice over fake fruit flavours it might come as a bit of a relief, but that’s not me.

As a side note, I’m not really sure I get the theme of these either. A skull and crossbones generally implies poison, so making a candy in that shape might be a little misleading. That is unless you really hate black licorice, then maybe it makes a lot of sense.