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Ask most people what bulk candy means and you’ll hear about buying by the case (sometimes by weight) at a lower price per piece than the little retail packs. Event planners buy it. Shop owners do too, and honestly anyone who needs a lot of candy. The best place to find it online is usually…

For a specialty shelf we’d go for the elegant fruit-forward side of French candy. That means pâtes de fruits (fruit jellies) and salted-butter caramels. Soft nougat is good too. So is guimauve, the French marshmallow. Then there are oddities like calissons and berlingots from particular regions. It all looks refined and gift-worthy, pretty much what…

If you only had room for one Spanish thing it’d be turrón, the almond nougat that pretty much all of Spanish confectionery grows out of. There’s a lot around it though. Spain has a big gummy and jelly habit and makes fruit-flavored hard candies too, and there’s usually some seasonal specialty coming and going. Because…

The British chocolate that sells best for resale is honestly the stuff people go looking for on purpose. UK-style milk chocolate and countline bars come to mind, and the old childhood favorites an expat or a curious specialty shopper can’t find on a domestic shelf. What they’re after is the taste. It’s sweeter and milkier…

Belgium got its chocolate name the slow way. A chocolatier there invented the filled praline in the early 1900s, the country kept its couverture standards high after that and somehow ended up with a crowd of skilled chocolatiers that’s out of proportion to its size, so when someone says “Belgian chocolate” most people just assume…

If somebody asked us over the counter, we’d tell them the Swiss made their name on milk chocolate that’s about as smooth as it gets (that comes from long conching, which we’ll get to) and the Belgians made theirs on the filled praline, the little molded shell with a ganache or cream center sitting inside.…

Put a Belgian bar next to the regular supermarket kind and you’ll notice it before you even taste it, mostly because of what it’s made from, which is real cocoa butter and a bigger share of cocoa (the couverture stuff), where the cheaper kind swaps in other fats. The refining is fine enough that it…

When somebody says German chocolate in the European sense they mean chocolate made in Germany, the kind known for milk and hazelnut bars and filled wafers and a strong gummy and licorice habit. It has nothing to do with the American dessert called “German chocolate cake” (that one’s named after a man called German and…

If I were building a European section I’d go country by country, with Swiss and Belgian chocolate up on the premium and gift shelf and Swedish and German gummies doing the everyday turnover. Dutch and Nordic licorice is for the enthusiasts. Italian nougat and wafers can give you a lift around the holidays. People often…

If you ask a few people what Dutch chocolate means you’ll get a couple of different answers, and they’re all a bit right. Sometimes it’s simply chocolate that was made in the Netherlands (fair enough). Other times somebody’s talking about cocoa that went through Dutching, where an alkali takes the sharp edge off the natural…