Malaco Swedish Candy in Australia

Djungelvrål is Malaco’s salty liquorice bag, and it holds four animal shapes rather than the one on the front: monkey, lion, squirrel and elephant. Malaco launched it in 1982, the name means jungle roar, and you say it yung-el-vrawl.

Salmiak is what makes it salty.

• What it is. Ammonium chloride, which Cloetta declares as salmiak on the pack.

• What it tastes like. Sharp and mineral, drying at the sides of the tongue, and it gets there before the liquorice does.

• What it isn’t. Anything like table salt.

The first piece is a genuine surprise and the fourth is usually the one that wins people over.

Djungelvrål has no gelatine in it. Already a salt liquorice drinker? This is the bag. New to it, and Ahlgrens Bilar Saltlakrits is the gentler start with Djungelvrål as the step up.

Gott & Blandat is the Malaco mixed bag, and five versions reach Australia. They’re genuinely different mixes, not the same sweets in different wrappers.

The mix goes back to a leftover bag. In 1979 the Malaco factory started bagging up the assorted sweets left over from packing pick and mix, fifty to a hundred kilos at a time. The production manager called it a levande blandning, a living mixture, since no two batches held quite the same thing, and a salesman named Anders Wester gave it the name at a sales conference in Jönköping. The note on the pack about the mixing ratio varying comes straight from that.

A Swedish pick-and-mix wall is the thing the world started posting about, and these are the bags it is built from.

Four of the thirteen come from Zoo, the fruit-flavoured jelly monkeys that began as an Ahlgrens product. Zoo Original is the chewy one, made with gelatine. The sour and sweet foamy monkeys take the same shape and whip it into a light foam with potato protein instead, so neither has gelatine in it. Lollipops Mix puts the classic Zoo and PimPim flavours on individually wrapped sticks and is the one for a party bag.

Fruxo, Fizzypop and PimPim fill out the thirteen. PimPim is the oldest, red raspberry jelly boats that have come in a little box since 1932.

• Made without gelatine. Djungelvrål, Gott & Blandat Original and Salt, Fruity Bites, Juicy Giants, Lollipops Mix, both foamy monkeys.

• Made with gelatine. Supersur, Fruxo, Fizzypop, PimPim, Zoo Original.

Cloetta labels Juicy Giants vegan; for the rest, the ingredient list on each product is the place to check.

Malaco itself began in Malmö in 1934 as Malmö Lakrits Compani, which is where the name comes from, and Cloetta has owned the brand since 2012. All thirteen of them post from Sweden to any Australian address, and the wider Swedish candy range puts Malaco next to Bubs and Ahlgrens Bilar.