The grandparent of Swedish confectionery
Cloetta has been making confectionery since 1862, and its best-known products are the ones nobody thinks to describe because every Swede already knows them. It also owns Malaco and Ahlgrens Bilar now, which means a surprising share of the Swedish candy aisle traces back to one company. The longer history is on the Cloetta brand page.
The three everyone names first
Kexchoklad is a wafer bar in milk chocolate and one of the best-selling single products in the country — the thing that gets bought at a petrol station without thinking. Plopp is a small square with a soft toffee centre, and the mint version splits opinion in a way the original does not. Polly is a bag of chocolate-covered foam that has been on the shelf since 1965 and tastes like almost nothing else: light, slightly chalky in a good way, and gone very quickly.
Where Cloetta fits against the rest
If Marabou is the block in the kitchen drawer, Cloetta is the bar in the coat pocket and the bag on the table. Same country, different moment. Most people who order Swedish chocolate for the first time end up with both, and then argue about which one their childhood belonged to.
Where to start
Kexchoklad if you want to understand why Swedes talk about it — it is unremarkable on paper and somehow the thing everybody reaches for. Plopp if you like toffee. Polly if you want something genuinely unlike anything sold elsewhere, because chocolate-covered foam is not a format most countries make.
Bear in mind that Cloetta's candy side is larger than its chocolate side: Malaco and Ahlgrens Bilar both sit under the same company, so a lot of what you would think of as a different brand is really this one wearing another name.