I bought a ton of Finnish candy and I regret nothing!

If you visit the Ranua wildlife zoo near Rovaniemi (Finland), you will have a very hard time avoiding the lure of the Fazer candy shop, which is right outside the zoo entrance. Fazer is one of the leading Finnish sweets brands and with good reason (yum!). My couchsurfing host Elina explained that the Ranua shop is a kind of a candy outlet store, selling all kinds of sweets for a discounted price compared to the regular supermarkets, so I did not even try to avoid it and just dived in headfirst.

They sell everything from cookies, bread sticks, crispbread with spices, chocolate with tons of different flavours and fillings, a whole zoo of gummy candies, both sweet and sour candy, as well as chocolate covered strawberries and cherries and many other things. However, unless you are Finnish or actually like the insanely weird taste of salty liquorice, you need to avoid the salmiakki bombs. Salmiaki is super popular in Finland, so plenty of mixed Fazer sweets bags had salmiakki candy in it. I carefully weeded those out and ended up with a huge candy haul for a very reasonable price of about 20 € if I remember correctly (in 2019).

They also sell their versions of Jaffa cookies, which are quite popular in Slovenia and Croatia and I did not realise they are equally popular in Finland. I always bring something for my couchsurfing hosts and I had a pack of our Jaffa cookies from when my mum was visiting Sweden, so I brought that for Elina and it turns out she knew all about them and even preferred our version.

Being me, I also bought a plushy in the Ranua zoo shop, because I am a big child at heart. This time it was a plushy beaver and of course I had to try the chocolate covered strawberries straight away, so the cover photo for this post was taken on the road to the Santa Claus village. I bought an extra pack of chocolate strawberries for my boyfriend and another chocolate cherry one, but I ate both of them before coming back to Slovenia, because they were amazing – no regrets!

Bonus video of a real beaver munching away at his carrot at the Ranua zoo, any resemblance to me eating all the chocolate treats in one go is just coincidental.