What is the worst candy you've ever tasted?

I’m seeing a lot of black licorice mentions, but there’s a special hell for Läkerol’s menthol black licorice.

Related anecdote: When I worked an offshore rotation with people from all over the world, I made an effort to bring candy that I'd never seen outside of Scandinavia. It was always amusing to see people sampling candy I liked when they weren't used to the ammonium chloride branch of flavors.

And once I brought this:

Everybody who weren't Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish (sadly we had no Danes on board) absolutely hated it. Especially the Americans and Brits.

Everyone except Mario, that is; a Croatian geophysicist. He loved them. His voice still lives rent free in my head over ten years later, saying "Sweet candy is for kids"

A few trips later I brought one of my favorites for basically the same result, but this time with Jim (from Illinois, iirc) complaining that it made his mouth physically hurt:

But to answer the question: Twizzlers. I bought some when visiting the US a couple of years ago. It tasted like oily sweetener (as in, clearly not actual sugar). That's when I learned that American and European wine gum are flavored very differently.

Footnote: Durian and durian chocolate is quite alright once you get used to the slight farty smell from each packet you open.

American or South African chocolate products.

NOT an anti-American/-Saffer thing. They add butyric acid, which tastes like vomit to the rest of the world. (Accurate, as vomit contains it).

Presumably because the market there have been trained to expect that flavour for some reason. To the rest of us, a US or ZA origin is usually a sign to avoid.

Salted liquorice.

I had a Norwegian friend who waxed lyrical about this stuff. So when I saw it for the first time in a shop, I grabbed a packet to nibble on while waiting for my train.

Plain black liquorice is delicious and salt makes everything taste better, and the Norwegian seemed like a nice, relatively normal person who enjoyed other things I liked. This was a low risk choice of mid morning snack, I thought to myself.

I was wrong. So very wrong.

This stuff tastes like it was peeled off the bottom of a shoe after walking through the city all day. It's not salt either, it's freaking ammonium chloride.

To paraphrase the Wikipedia:

The mineral is commonly formed on burning coal dumps from condensation of coal-derived gases. It is also found around some types of volcanic vents. It is a product of the reaction of hydrochloric acid and ammonia.

And Scandi's put this on liquorice and like it. Even the kids. Madness. It took my all not to heave into a bin after trying it and like six cups of black tea to get the taste out of my mouth.

I gave the Norwegian the rest of the packet and he laughed at me while I watched him eat it because I looked so horrified.

I got a monthly food box for my wife a number of years ago. Each month they sent snacks from a different country.

I can't remember which country it was from, but one month we got some round, hard candies. It was one of the most unfortunate things I have ever intentionally put into my mouth.

I don't even remember the flavor (licorice, maybe?), because my brain attempted to bleach it out.

Everything else was usually tasty, though.

Black licorice.

I firmly believe candy should be sweet; not bitter.

Swede here.

Some American candy, mostly bad chocolate

When I was a kid someone gave me a "buttered popcorn" flavored dum-dum sucker. It tasted so terrible that it gave me a taste aversion to real buttered popcorn for nearly 2 decades.

Hersheys "chocolate". I spit it out, and a bit embarrassed, asked "could it gone bad during the flight?"

Well, obviously this stuff does taste like vomit, and Americans seem to be OK with that. Explains a lot about American behavior. If chocolate here would taste like that, we probably would have more mass shootings, too.

any American chocolate tastes like vomit

Licorice, that funny retro looking shit with the black and bright colors. They are as revolting to me as sushi

At my place of work, one project we worked on involved a lot of contractors from a place based in China. (The project was an absolute cluster-fuck all the way from soup to nuts, but that's a story for another day.) When the project concluded, they sent our office a thank-you gift box of various Chinese snacks.

One of the snacks was a... dried... meat... "candy"... I guess? The taste wasn't "sweet" so much. It tasted like it had been dipped in perfume. And the texture of the meat was hard to describe. Not chewy like jerky, and it didn't have that highly-processed Slim Jim sort of texture to it. Maybe it was sortof freeze-dried or something? I also couldn't identify what animal the meat might have come from. (And I couldn't read the text on the packaging.)

I'm not sure whether it was just an acquired taste or rather a practical joke by the folks at the Chinese company. Lol.

Twizzlers.

I tried them in the US and it just felt like I was chewing on a piece of plastic.

On the other hand, unlike most of the people in the comments, I love licorice.

First of all, licorice is good actually, though black jelly beans are trash.

One time I bought olive flavored gummies from the Asian market because I love olives and I was curious. Absolutely horrible, didn't even finish one.

That's an easy one - Durian bonbons from China. Durian is also known as the "stink fruit". You need many hours to get that taste out of your mouth

Turkish delights tend to be terrible. Insanely chewy and sticky, floral and just unpleasant. I also tried some sweet "goat cheese and spice lollipop" candy from mexico i didn't care for much.

Black licorice fucks though. I'll stand with the swedes on this one.

Black licorice is just horrific. I try it every once in a while as I age thinking "Old people like this, maybe I'm old enough to like it myself, now", but no. It's still an instant headache/nausea combo at one taste. Ugh.

Hands down absolutely nothing worse than peeps. They somehow manage to make twizzlers taste like ultra gourmet candy.

The disgusting Harry Potter every flavour beans. They had jelly belly jelly beans that tasted like dirt, grass, booger, vomit, ear wax, and others I can't remember.

American candy. Not American brand candy which different outside the US, but actuall American candy. It's all so bad quality and vile that it would never sell outside the US and not even be legal to do so in many places.

Probably these little lychee candy things I had years ago. No fruit flavor at all. Tasted as though someone mixed powdered blackboard chalk and sugar.

Peeps. I've never like marshmallow anything, really, and definitely not those abominations. Most cinnamon-flavored things. Edit: forgot one: chocolate-covered cherries. I don't know why. I have a cherry tree and will eat the cherries off it and don't even mind most artificially-cheery-flavored things. I also eat other fruits covered in chocolate (even durian).

Cella's milk chocolate covered cherries. My grams was addicted to them, so I'd bring a box when I visited. I couldn't even stand the way they smelled though lol

There is this brittle thing of foam everyone likes to make into weird shapes like little birds... I don't know what it is called and I don't want too

If I had to choose between leather belt flavoured licorice and vomit flavoured Hershey's. Licorice wins everytime.