I am not particularly addicted to sugar. Give me cheese over sweets any day. But there are a handful of French sweets I genuinely miss when I am not in France, simply because you cannot find them anywhere else. And once you have had the real thing, nothing else quite does it.
Every region in France has its own sweet. Proper regional specialities with centuries of history, fierce local pride, and recipes passed down like family secrets. Not mass-produced brand-name french candy you can grab in any airport. These are sweets that come from specific towns, made by families who have been doing it the same way for generations.
France cannot do anything without making it official, so many of these sweets have protected status, heritage designations, or are still produced by the same families that started them over a century ago. Here are the ones worth knowing about, and where possible, worth buying.
Pastilles Vichy
White octagonal lozenges stamped with the word Vichy that taste of mint and minerals. Created in 1825 using actual water from the thermal springs in Vichy, they were originally sold purely for their digestive properties. Empress Eugénie was apparently a fan, which helped sales considerably.
These french mint sweets straddle the line between medicine and confectionery in a way that is distinctly French. Pharmacies still stock them alongside actual medication. The mineral taste is particular: clean, slightly chalky, with a cool mint finish that lingers. Some people love them immediately. Others find them an acquired taste. But they have been going for nearly 200 years and produce around 1,500 tonnes annually, which suggests the acquired taste is worth acquiring.
Not really for children. These are adult french candy, typically sucked after large meals by people who take their digestion seriously.
Bonbons de Pin des Vosges
These are the French sweets I miss most for their completely distinctive taste. If you know an English equivalent, please tell me, because I have never found one.
Head to the Vosges, Jura, or Alps and you will find french bonbons that taste like you are eating a forest. Made with pine sap or fir buds, often combined with honey and menthol, these are proper mountain people sweets. They are still marketed for clearing airways and supporting breathing, which is why they are sold in pharmacies alongside more conventional remedies.
The taste is intensely pine-forward. Imagine walking through a conifer forest, then add sugar and a french mint edge. Artisan confectioners in Gérardmer and other Vosges towns make them in copper cauldrons using traditional methods that have not changed in generations.
You either love these or find them completely bizarre. There is no middle ground. But if you have ever had a cold while hiking in the mountains, you will understand immediately why they exist.
Violettes de Toulouse
Small purple french candy shaped and flavoured like violets. These are hard-boiled sweets made with violet extract, sugar, and natural colourings, intensely floral and perfumed. They have been made in Toulouse since the early 1900s when the city was genuinely famous for violet cultivation.
Violets were serious business in Toulouse from the 1850s onwards. Around 600 families lived off violet sales in winter. The flowers were exported across Europe. When that industry declined, the sweets kept the violet tradition alive. The brand Violette de Toulouse is now protected, and various confectioners still make violet-flavoured products: candies, liqueur, perfume, and even mustard.
The flavour divides people. Some find it like eating soap. I love floral flavours, so I find them genuinely delicious. They are quite old-fashioned now, the sort of popular candy in france that French grandmothers keep in a tin on the coffee table. Worth trying once at minimum.
La Forestine de Bourges
Considered the world’s first filled sugar sweet, created in 1879 by Georges Forest. A smooth praline filling of almonds, hazelnuts, and chocolate, wrapped in a satiny sugar shell that comes in various pearlescent colours.
The sugar coating is still hand-beaten to achieve its distinctive satin-like appearance. They are cut and separated by hand using techniques that are over 140 years old. The Tavernier family, now in their fourth generation, still makes them in Bourges.
La Forestine is registered in France’s national gastronomic heritage inventory and won a Slow Food prize for tradition in 2012. They are not cheap, but this is proper artisan french candy, not something churned out by the tonne. Worth buying as a gift if you are ever in Bourges.
Berlingots
Small pyramid-shaped hard french sweets. Two towns claim them, Carpentras and Nantes, and they are quite different from each other.
Berlingots de Carpentras are translucent with white stripes, made from candied fruit syrup. They were created around 1844 when a pastry-maker had the idea to use leftover syrup from making candied fruits. The white stripes come from beaten sugar mixed into coloured sugar paste. Flavours include mint, anise, lemon, orange, and lavender.
Berlingots Nantais are opaque, smaller, and coated in sugar rather than striped. Made at the end of the 19th century when Nantes had a thriving sweet industry due to its port importing sugar cane. Flavours include orange, lemon, blackcurrant, strawberry, anise, caramel, and mint.
By the 1950s, Carpentras berlingots were enormously popular, with over 2,000 tonnes produced annually. Both versions remain excellent examples of regional french bonbons with genuine histories behind them.
Bêtises de Cambrai
Small rectangular french mint sweets with caramel stripes, created by accident in 1850. Bêtise means stupid mistake in French. An apprentice at a Cambrai confectionery made an error while preparing sweets, his mother said he had made bêtises, but customers loved the result.
Made from boiled sugar with mint flavouring, with thin caramel stripes added to balance the mint. Two confectioners still claim to be the original inventors: Afchain and Despinoy. Both still make them today.
Around 400 tonnes are produced annually. New flavours have appeared over the years, orange, lemon, raspberry, violet, chocolate, but the original french mint version remains the most popular. They are refreshing, have supposed digestive benefits, and are sold in attractive tins featuring Cambrai street scenes.
Bergamotes de Nancy
Amber-coloured hard french sweets made from sugar and bergamot essential oil. Created in 1857 in Nancy, when a candy-maker successfully combined bergamot essence with sugar at a perfumer’s suggestion. Bergamot is a small citrus fruit mainly cultivated in Calabria, Italy. The essential oil from its peel is also used to flavour Earl Grey tea, which gives you a sense of its distinctive fragrance.
The sweets are translucent, fragrant, and distinctively flat and square. The sugar is heated over an open flame, then bergamot essence is added. After cooking, it is poured onto marble to cool before being hand-cut. They have Protected Geographical Indication status since 1996, making them one of the more officially protected french bonbons in France.
Confiserie Stanislas is Nancy’s most renowned maker. The flavour is perfumed and citrusy, quite sophisticated compared to straightforward fruity sweets. This is popular candy in france that rewards people who like complexity in their confectionery.
Anis de Flavigny
Made in the Benedictine Abbey in Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in Burgundy since 1591. Possibly the oldest branded sweet still in continuous production in France, and one of the most distinctive french sweets you will encounter.
A single anise seed sits at the centre of each sweet, coated in thin layers of sugar syrup in large copper basins over 15 days. The result is a small, perfectly round sweet with a hard sugar exterior and an anise centre that releases its flavour gradually as the layers dissolve.
The classic flavour is anise, that distinctive liquorice-adjacent taste that French people grow up with. They also make rose, violet, mint, orange blossom, lemon, and others, all using natural flavourings extracted from plants through steam or alcohol distillation.
The Troubat family has run production since 1923. The tins are oval-shaped metal containers with vintage pastoral illustrations, beautiful enough to keep long after the sweets are gone. Louis XIV apparently carried a box everywhere. The Anis de Flavigny holds Living Heritage Company status and has been recognised as a Remarkable Taste Site. Exported to over 35 countries.
If you visit Burgundy, the abbey is open to visitors. You can watch them being made.
Pastille du Mineur
Small black liquorice pastilles from the mining regions of northern France, particularly around Lens and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Created for coal miners, but not for the reason you might expect.
These french candy pieces were designed to suppress the urge to smoke while working underground in gas-filled mines where a lit cigarette could cause an explosion. The flavour had to be strong enough to satisfy a cigarette craving during long shifts underground. They are intensely powerful: proper liquorice with menthol and eucalyptus. The sort of french mint-adjacent sweet that makes your eyes water if you are not expecting it.
As a side benefit, they also soothed throats irritated by coal dust. The mines closed decades ago, but the pastilles are still made and still popular in the region. They are sold in old-fashioned tins and packets with miner imagery on the packaging, keeping the area’s industrial heritage in a form you can eat.
If you like Fisherman’s Friend, you will get on with these.
Bonbons à la Feuille de Verveine
Hard-boiled sweets flavoured with verveine, lemon verbena, a herb widely grown in southern France, particularly in the Velay region around Le Puy-en-Velay. These green or amber-coloured sweets have been made since the 19th century when verveine liqueur production was at its peak in the area.
The flavour is herbal and lemony, fresh and aromatic. Real verveine french bonbons are made with infusions or distillations of the actual plant rather than artificial flavouring, and you can taste the difference. There is a complexity and slight bitterness that balances the sugar in a way that artificial versions never manage.
The Velay region is particularly known for them. Verveine has been cultivated there since Benedictine monks introduced it centuries ago. You will find them in confiseries throughout the Haute-Loire and Auvergne, often sold alongside verveine liqueur and other local products.
Do you have a sweet tooth for French sweets?
There are supposedly over 600 traditional french sweets across the country, so this list has barely scratched the surface. If you want somewhere to start, the Anis de Flavigny are the most accessible introduction to regional french bonbons: widely available, beautifully packaged, and mild enough to win over people who are not sure about anise. The Bergamotes de Nancy are the choice if you want something more sophisticated. The Bonbons de Pin are the most distinctive and the ones you will find nowhere else.
And if your French grandmother always had a particular tin in her handbag that has not been mentioned here, tell us about it in the comments. I am always looking for new ones.
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