French Candy and Sweets | The Treats Worth Seeking Out

I am not someone who craves sugar. Most of the time I would happily choose cheese over dessert. And yet there is French candy I actively miss when I am out of the country. Not because I crave sugar, but because you cannot buy them anywhere else. Once you have tasted a pine sweet from the Vosges or an anise seed wrapped in fifteen days of sugar, nothing can really replace them.

Every region in France has its own sweet, proper local specialities with centuries of history behind them, fierce pride, and recipes that are passed down like family secrets. I am not talking about mass-produced brand-name sweets.These are french candy tied to specific towns, often made by the same families who have been doing it the same way for generations.

In a hurry? Jump to the what to buy first table, or the FAQ.

Why French candy is a regional thing

French candy works the same as cheese or wine. Every region claims its own, defends it fiercely, and will tell you the neighbouring version is an imitation. If you have read my piece on cheese fondue savoyarde or raclette, you already know how territorial this country gets about a recipe.

There are said to be more than 600 traditional varieties across France. Many of them started life in a pharmacy rather than a sweet shop, which explains why so much popular candy in France tastes of mint, anise, liquorice or pine. Sugar was sold by apothecaries before it was sold by confectioners, and these recipes are still there today.

Pastilles Vichy

These white pastilles were born in 1825, when the chemist Jean-Pierre-Joseph d’Arcet worked out how to draw the mineral salts out of the Vichy thermal waters and press them into a tablet. They are stamped with the word Vichy, just in case your forgot. And they were again sold in pharmacies, not sweet shops. The octagonal shape came thirty years later, when the Compagnie Fermière de Vichy wanted something instantly recognisable on a shelf full of rivals. Empress Eugénie who was married to Napoleon III was apparently a fan, which did not hurt their reputation.

The french mint pastille turned 200 in 2025 and the town gave it a full year of celebrations. Around 1,300 tonnes still leave the Vichy factory annually, and neighbouring Maison Moinet makes several hundred tonnes more of the closely related pastille du bassin de Vichy from its own spring at Hauterive.

The taste is clean, cool and faintly saline. They are not really a children’s sweet. They are very much an adult thing, usually enjoyed slowly after a meal that might give indigestion to some.

Bonbons de Pin des Vosges

This French candy is the one I miss most, because I have never found anything close.

In the Vosges, Jura, or Alps, you find sweets that taste like eating a forest. They are made with pine sap or fir buds, often with honey and menthol, and they are very much mountain-people sweets. They are still sold as something to clear the airways and help with breathing, which is why you will often find them as well in pharmacies alongside more conventional remedies.

The flavour is pure pine, which is very unique and tasty! Artisan makers in Gérardmer and other Vosges towns still cook them in copper cauldrons using traditional methods that have barely changed in generations.

You either fall in love with them or find them completely strange. There is not much in between. But if you have ever had a cold they are just brilliant to free your airways. Although I eat them purely for pleasure. If you are heading to the mountains in France, find these french sweets and don’t forget to also find a tartiflette while you’re in the neighborhood.

Violettes de Toulouse

These are hard-boiled small purple sweets shaped like violets are made with violet extract, tasting exactly as floral as they look. They have been made in Toulouse since the early 1900s.

Toulouse was a violet town. From the 1850s onwards, hundreds of families around the city made their living growing the flowers through winter and shipping them across Europe. The trade collapsed for a while but luckily the sweets, violet syrup and liqueur kept the flavour alive! The name Violette de Toulouse is now protected, and local confectioners still turn the flower into sweets, syrup, perfume and even mustard.

This flavour is also one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Some people say it tastes like soap. I happen to love floral flavours, which is also why I keep coming back to my lavender lemon cake. They are a bit old-fashioned now, but some violet addicts like me still buy them for secret flower moments.

La Forestine de Bourges

La Forestine is often described as the world’s first filled sugar sweet, created in 1879 by Georges Forest. Inside there is a smooth praline of almonds, hazelnuts, and chocolate, wrapped in a satiny sugar shell that comes in soft, pearly colours. The sugar is still pulled by hand to get that satin finish, then cut and separated piece by piece. In 1896 Forest handed the recipe to his friend Georges Tavernier, and four generations of Taverniers have made it since, in the same building on the place Cujas. Silver at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, gold at the Exposition Coloniale in 1931, and a place in France’s national inventory of culinary heritage.

La Forestine is listed in France’s national gastronomic heritage inventory and even won a Slow Food prize for tradition in 2012. They are not cheap, but this is real artisan French confectionery, not something churned out by the tonne. If you ever pass through Bourges, they make a brilliant gift!

If the almond and hazelnut praline appeals, it is the same flavour family as financiers and massepain de Saint-Léonard, in case you need something to fix that nutty craving.

Berlingots

Berlingots de Carpentras are translucent striped pyramid-shaped boiled sweets, made from the leftover syrup of candied fruit production. They appeared around 1844, when a Carpentras pastry maker decided the syrup was too good to throw away. The white stripes come from aerated sugar worked through the coloured paste. Mint, anise, lemon, orange, lavender. These are the ones I grew up with in the south, sold in paper cones at markets, and by the 1950s Carpentras was turning out more than 2,000 tonnes a year.

There’s also Berlingots nantais. These are smaller, opaque and dusted with sugar rather than striped. They arrived at the end of the 19th century, when Nantes had a sugar industry built on its port.

The Carpentras version exists because somebody refused to waste good syrup, which is the same reflex behind my confiture de sucrine. Provençal thrift makes very good things happen.

Bêtises de Cambrai

Bêtises de Cambrai are small rectangular cushions mint sweets with caramel stripes, born from a mistake in 1850. Bêtise means “blunder” in French. An apprentice in a Cambrai confectionery messed up a batch, his mother called them bêtises, and customers ended up loving them.

They are made from boiled sugar flavoured with mint, with thin caramel stripes added to soften the mintiness. Two houses still claim to be the original makers, Afchain and Despinoy, and both continue to produce them today. Around 400 tonnes are made each year. Over time new flavours have appeared, orange, lemon, raspberry, violet, chocolate, but the original mint version is still the favourite. They are refreshing and said to aid digestion.

Bergamotes de Nancy

Another floral hard sweet that I adore. These are flat amber rectangles, translucent as stained glass and made from cooked sugar and bergamot essential oil. The taste is perfumed and citrusy, more sophisticated than straightforward fruit sweets, and perfect if you like a bit of complexity in your candy. It’s the most elegant sweet on this list in my opinion, and the one I would serve after crêpes Suzette if I wanted to show off.

They were created around 1850 by Jean-Frédéric Godefroy Lillig, a confectioner from Württemberg working in Nancy, who added a few drops of bergamot essence to boiled sugar on the advice of a perfumer friend. Bergamot is the small Calabrian citrus that scents Earl Grey tea, which gives you an idea of the aroma. The sugar is cooked over flame, poured onto marble, and cut by hand.

In 1996 the Bergamote de Nancy became the first and still the only French sweet to hold Protected Geographical Indication status. That means natural Calabrian bergamot oil, a set size and translucency, and individual wrapping. Around 33 tonnes are sold under the label each year, made by a handful of Nancy houses including Confiserie Stanislas, Maison Jean Lalonde and the Sœurs Macarons.

Anis de Flavigny

These little white pearls have made it pretty far in the world. They are made in a Benedictine abbey at Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in Burgundy since at least 1591, which makes this the oldest French candy still in production.

Each sweet begins as a single green anise seed. It goes into a copper pan and receives thin layer after thin layer of flavoured sugar syrup over about fifteen days, until it weighs exactly one gram. Only a handful of people alive know how to do it and there is no school for it. The result is a small hard pearl that dissolves slowly down to the seed at its centre.

The original flavour is anise, that liquorice-like taste many French people grow up with. There are also rose, violet, mint, orange blossom, lemon, and other varieties, all flavoured with plant extracts obtained through steam or alcohol distillation. The Troubat family has run the production since 1923. The sweets come in oval metal tins with old-fashioned pastoral illustrations, I always keep mine long after they are empty to store small things in. Anis de Flavigny holds Living Heritage Company status and is recognised as a Remarkable Taste Site, with exports to more than 35 countries.

If you ever find yourself in Burgundy, the abbey is open to visitors and you can actually watch them being made.

Pastille du Mineur

These dark liquorice pastilles come from the coal country around Lens, and the reason they exist is not what you would guess.

They were designed to keep miners from wanting a cigarette while working underground in gas-filled shafts, where a single lit cigarette could cause an explosion! The flavour had to be strong enough to see a man through an entire shift without reaching for a cigarette, so it is intense: real liquorice with menthol and eucalyptus.

They had a bonus effect too, soothing throats irritated by coal dust. The mines have been closed for decades now, but the pastilles are still made and still loved locally. They come in old-fashioned tins and packets decorated with images of miners, so the region’s industrial history lives on in something you can actually eat. If you like Fisherman’s Friend, you will get on with these.

Bonbons à la Verveine

And at last, there are the hard-boiled green or amber boiled sweets flavoured with lemon verbena, from the Velay around Le Puy-en-Velay.

Verbena has grown there since Benedictine monks introduced it, and the sweets date from the 19th century when verbana liqueur was at its peak. The taste is herbal and lemony with a slight bitterness that keeps the sugar honest. The real verbana bonbons are made with infusions or distillations of the actual plant, not artificial flavours, and you can tell. There is a depth and slight bitterness that keeps the sugar in check in a way fake versions never manage.

You will find them in confiseries across the Haute-Loire and the Auvergne, usually shelved next to the green bottles of verbana that started it all.

FAQ

What was in your grandmother’s handbag?

If your French grandmother always had a particular tin in her handbag that has not made this list, tell me what it was in the comments. If you don’t have a French grandmother, tell me what you discovered while traveling through the country! I am always looking for new ones to try.

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