What Is The World's Most Sour Candy?

While candy is synonymous with sweetness, some candies go in the opposite direction and try to make themselves as sour as anything composed of sugar can be. Mildly sour candies like Pixy Sticks and SweeTarts can serve as a gateway, but once you get hooked on the stinging pain of sour candies, you may find yourself sucking down harder stuff like Cry Baby and Warheads (although the latter may no longer be as sour as they once were). If there's no such thing as too sour for you, you may be wondering what the world's sourest candy could be.

The real answer is it's hard to tell. While we have attempted a (somewhat) formal taxonomy of sour candies, as far as we're aware, there's no Scoville Scale for sourness. Well, actually, there is such a thing as a sourness index, but it seems to be used more by scientists than candy makers. For the most part, what we have to go on are manufacturers' claims, plus the overall opinion of the internet. There's no true consensus that will allow us to declare an undisputed winner, but one strong candidate is a British candy called Black Death Ultra Sour, made by Mr. Simms Sweet Shop. The website modestly claims: "Some say, the most sour sweet ever," and several Redditors concur. One TikTok user went even farther, however, comparing eating the candy to having a metal rod shoved into their throat.

Another contender to hold the crown of the world's sourest candy is Barnett's Mega Sours. As Barnett's, like Mr. Simms, is a British firm, it, too, uses the oxymoron "world's most sour sweet" to describe its product. Both candies have identical ingredients of sugar, glucose, citric acid, malic acid, bicarbonate of soda (aka baking soda), and flavoring, but the two differ in that the latter offers a choice of flavors. Black Death Ultra Sours only come in lemon (belied by their coal-black exterior), while Mega Sours come in a wide variety, including apple, bubblegum, cherry, cola, lemon, raspberry, watermelon, and even a few less familiar flavors such as plum, rhubarb custard, and violet. While most of these don't seem to be sold in the U.S., Amazon does offer a Mega Sour fruit assortment featuring lime, orange, pineapple, and strawberry candies.

The British don't have a monopoly on the sour candy market, however. The website CandyStore came up with its own sour candy ranking, and while it didn't include Black Death candies (these can be hard to come by since Mr. Simms only ships within the U.K. and to Singapore), they listed Mega Sours in the fourth place spot. Coming ahead of these were Cry Baby Tears, Warheads Extreme Sour, and in the top spot, Toxic Waste Hazardously Sour, the latter of which can also be purchased on Amazon. These last-named candies are available in flavors including apple, black cherry, blue raspberry, and watermelon, but anecdotal evidence would have it that the lemon ones are the sourest of all.