Haribo Sour Gummies, My Summer Addiction

Even before I left for Germany, this summer was going to be noted by my consumption of Haribo Sour Strips. 

I had had such a stressful spring semester of teaching, juggling my job with a night class, a foreign exchange, and huge personal challenges, one day I stopped at Dollar General for some comfort food. That was my first taste, which led to an addiction.


Of course, Germany is the home of Haribo. The sour strips they sell here are missing the blue raspberry taste, but they include “Cola”--at least in Berlin.  It seems, though, that while there are always sour gummies to be found, they aren’t always the same. At the local Lidl in Ingelheim am Rhein, where I like to pick up an after-school pretzel they have fruit-shaped sour chews.


A few times when I got the urge, the candies have had mixed flavors: cola with apple, say, or peach with purple. Those are always reallly fun to taste.


And in Bremen, where I picked up this bag, the sour gummies were “pasta” shaped. I don't really think the shape added much to the sour-fruity taste, but it added some "meat" to the bite. Yum! (I also liked that the gummies were "veggie", i.e. not made with gelatin that uses animal parts.)



Today I stopped at Rewe to get my fix, uh, pick up some important foodstuffs for my final week in Mainz. They had a nice selection of Haribo Sauer candies. There were sour-gummy friench fries.


And sour-gummie "beans," which made me think of jelly beans--something yummy, but an altogether different candy. Notice that the mascot is a pot (which I confused for a garbage can, at first).



There are Haribo-Sauer for every occasion, for example, there are surfboards.



And also cola bottles (which I didn't take a photo of. They also had packs of lemon-flavored sour-gummies and peach-flavored (also popular in the USA). Take a look at their web site to see the full range. They even have sour "Super Pickles" and crocodiles.


The existence of a factory store in Bonn (the "BO" in the Ha-Ri-Bo portmanteau) makes a visit to that Rhine city more likely for me--and more delicious for all. The Ha and Ri come from the first letters of the two founders of the candy company that invented gummy bears in Bonn in 1920.


So where did my appetite take me today? I went with the delicious, classic Haribo Goldbären Sauer. Mmmmm.

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