14 Australian Candies We Wish Were Available in the US

If specialty candies are among the Australian sweet treats you want to try, you’re probably out of luck finding them in the U.S. unless you order internationally or happen to live near an international market that imports them. Some Australian candy companies don’t even distribute their candies throughout the whole of Australia, let alone to the U.S. While there are a few popular Australian candies that have U.S. distributors now, like Violet Crumble, Tim Tams, and Darrell Lea, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. So, there are lots of candies that those of us in the U.S. will never get to experience without traveling to Australia or paying enormous shipping costs.

The more we’ve learned about Australian candies, the more intrigued we’ve become by just how different some of them really are from standard U.S. candy offerings. Australia seems to have more animal-themed candies than we do in the U.S., as well as flavors and ingredient combinations you wouldn’t necessarily find in a U.S. candy store. Thus, we’re all the more curious about trying them someday. The following 14 Australian candies have us particularly intrigued.

With cute kangaroo-like wallabies only living in Australia, nearby Tasmania, and Papua New Guinea, Wallaby Bites are a candy that you wouldn’t expect to come across in any other region of the world. The bite-sized chocolate- or yogurt-covered candy squares contain a variety of ingredients inside, depending on the flavor you choose. 

There’s currently no shortage of Wallaby Bites to choose from. The regular Wallaby Bites line features candy with fruit and nut middles, as well as a dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or yogurt coating. The orange almond coconut flavor comes with either a dark chocolate or yogurt exterior. There’s also the Wallaby Nutty Bites line, which features a sticky mixture of crunchy nuts and seeds that has only the bottom portion dipped in dark chocolate. This line comes in both a vanilla and sea salt flavor. Another line is the keto-friendly Wallaby Cookie Dough Bites, which come with either chocolate macadamia cookie dough or double chocolate hazelnut cookie dough inside a dark chocolate coating.

While you might be able to find all sorts of Cadbury bars in the U.S., you won’t find Cadbury Dairy Milk Freddo, which is an Australian invention. Freddo Frog was dreamed up in Australia as a chocolate character in the 1930s. However, it didn’t originally belong to Cadbury, but was eventually bought by the company in 1967.

Freddo Frog — both the character and chocolate — has had quite a life. It starred in both radio and television shows, and the candy has been part of eating competitions, prizes for other competitions, and rewards for getting vaccines.

However, Freddo has had a makeover over the years. He’s gone from having a more realistic frog shape to becoming a slim cartoon frog. Sometimes the chocolate has looked more like a 3D frog, while other times, it’s simply been a piece of chocolate with a Freddo Frog embossed design on top. Today, milk chocolate is not the only Freddo candy flavor available — there’s also a strawberry flavor as well as milky top (milk chocolate topped with white chocolate). Plus, there are milk chocolate-covered cookies, too. The most popular flavors come in multipacks of several individually-wrapped, frog-shaped chocolates.

Another animal-themed Australian candy that we’re dying to try is Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Caramello Koala. If we’re too far away to cuddle a real-life koala bear, the novelty of a candy one would be nice.

Caramello Koalas are adorable little 3D milk chocolate koalas with a smooth and slightly viscous caramel filling inside.The Caramello Koala is rumored to have began as a Caramello Bear back in the late 1960s, before changing its name in the 1980s. While koalas pretty much always look like cartoon characters, the shapes of Caramello Koalas have evolved with time, much like Freddo Frog. There was even a version that had the koala hanging from a eucalyptus tree.

Once upon a time in the early 1980s, you could get Caramello Koalas in the U.S. under the name Aussie Bear. However, these days, we’re stuck with plain Caramellos in boring little square or candy-bar shapes.

Allen’s Lollies have been an iconic part of the Australian candy scene since 1891, a whole decade before Australia even became a proper country with its own federal elections. One of the company’s claims to fame is not using artificial additives, and it’s been owned by Nestlé since 1987. It’s hard to narrow down our list of lollies to focus on, since the company has made over 1,000 varieties over the years.

We found dozens of varieties of Allen’s lollies currently in production, and Australia has its favorites. The most popular varieties include Snakes Alive and Party Mix. Every year, the company makes 240 million bags of Snakes Alive. It also makes enough Party Mix to adorn over 12 million birthday cakes. The Party Mix is popular for decorating and filling birthday cakes because it contains a mixture of several different Allen’s Lollies favorites, like bananas, black cats, snakes, and frogs alive. The brand makes candies like jelly beans and mints that you’d easily recognize. However, it also makes candies that might need a little explanation, like a “Jaffas Casket” — a milk chocolate egg filled with orange-flavored chocolate balls called jaffas. So, this brand is definitely among the list of international candies we wish we could find in U.S. stores.

With so much fruit being available in the Barossa and Riverland areas of South Australia, W. Menz & Co. got the idea of making chocolate-covered dried fruit candies in 1948. And it was a great idea, as they’ve continued to be a favorite candy over the years. Picking up a bag of FruChocs is necessary any time you visit Southern Australia, as it’s an iconic candy there. You can even find FruChocs Shops in a few cities.

FruChocs come in a variety of flavors. You’ll find them with milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate coatings. Some of the fruits you might find inside include a mixture of apricot and peach, orange, strawberry, or raspberry. There’s even a package of the apricot and peach variety that contains a mixture of candies with all three types of chocolate coatings. Only a few stores stock these Menz candies even within Australia. So, don’t hold out hope of finding them in the U.S. any time soon.

Even if you’re not a big fan of licorice flavor, Fyna Liquorice candies look enticing enough to try. For one thing, they come in all types of flavors and shapes, and not all of them are black licorice-flavored.

Fyna has been making its liquorice candies since 1973. Over the years, the company has developed six distinctive shapes. The logs are long and cylindrical. Bites are shorter than logs and are almost cylinders, except that one side has been flattened so they won’t roll. Bullets are short cylinders that are tapered at each end to look more like very large pill capsules. Twists look like traditional cylindrical licorice sticks with ridged surfaces. Chunks are shortened versions of twists. Lastly, wheels are flattened long pieces of candy rolled into an expanding circle.

The flavors, however, are more intriguing. There’s black licorice and raspberry licorice options, and the fruit bites feature black licorice stuffed with fruit flavors. Then you have milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or white chocolate candies stuffed with either black or raspberry licorice.

You know a chocolate heart candy must be good when it’s been around since 1938. Granted, there are plenty of times when chocolate hearts are great for showering upon the ones you love, like on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. However, these days, Fyna puts out all sorts of Pink Lady chocolates besides the standard heart shapes.

What makes Pink Lady Chocolates so good is that the company uses a process called “conching” to make its chocolates. Basically, the cocoa solids and sugar crystals are refined until their particles are as small as possible, which results in a super-smooth chocolate product.

While the hearts are the most iconic item the company creates, it has other chocolate products, too. Pink Lady Hearts come in both dark chocolate and milk chocolate varieties and are available in various foil colors. The company also produces other dark-, milk-, and white chocolate-covered products like caramels, Turkish delights, various flavors of licorice, pastilles, and ginger. Plus, it has a few types of chocolate candy bars. So, there’s something for every type of chocolate lover, including products we never knew we needed to try until now.

Just looking at Melbourne Rock Candy inspires fond memories of old-fashioned Christmas candy from years past. While some of the shapes and flavors look familiar, others don’t. We’d have to start with the family assorted variety — there are too many interesting flavors available to try just one.

The company has only been around since 1977, but it uses even older machines from the 1940s as well as traditional recipes. So, it really is a blast from the past; in fact, the company claims to be one of the few candy makers left in Australia using traditional candy manufacturing processes.

Some of the flavors are uniquely Australian. For example, Bo Peep capitalizes on eucalyptus oil and menthol oil. The musk rock flavor is fairly unique, too, tasting like musky perfume. Among the ordinary candy fruit flavors like raspberry and strawberry, you’ll also find unexpected ones like passionfruit and rhubarb. Fizzoes promise a fizzy sherbet experience, and there are also odd ducks like lemon-flavored Barley Sugar candies and aniseed-flavored Humbugs.

Polly Waffles are chocolate candies that wrap an inner marshmallow core with waffle wafer and a coating of chocolate. So, it’s a textural and flavor-filled experience. Polly Waffle candy bars have been around since 1947 and were originally made by Hoadley’s Chocolates. The original bars had a tubular marshmallow core. However, they were discontinued in 2009 when sales started falling. With so many people missing the nostalgic candy, Robern Menz decided to buy the Polly Waffle brand from Nestlé in 2019 so that it could bring the treat back to fans.

When Polly Waffles returned to shelves in 2024, they were no longer bars but Polly Waffle Bites, which are probably easier to produce. Even though the original version is nowhere to be found at this early point of the brand’s return, we’d still love to experience biting through milk chocolate and crisp waffle wafer coatings to get to the marshmallowy center of the Bites.

While we’ve occasionally seen Milo on the shelf in the international section of grocery stores in the U.S., we’ve never seen a Milo KitKat among the wide variety of KitKats on offer. There could be a few reasons for this: First, most people aren’t familiar enough with the Milo flavor for it to be an appealing buy. For those who haven’t experienced the pleasure of Australia’s Milo powdered drink, it’s a chocolate malt beverage powder that mixes with milk or water, kind of like Ovaltine. However, a feature of the drink is its crunchy bits that don’t dissolve. So, if you think an Ovaltine KitKat might be interesting, you might be a fan of Milo KitKats.

Milo got its start in 1934 during the Great Depression, but Milo KitKats first came out in Australia’s winter of 2022. So, they’re fairly new on the candy scene relative to most others on this list. At first, there were three types available, including ordinary KitKat blocks and bars as well as a chunky version. Each is made up of chocolate covered wafers like normal KitKats, but they’re filled with Milo powder. Yum.

Of all the Australian candies on this list, it’s primarily the Cadbury Cherry Ripe that has us wishing we could find a U.S. retailer that imported Australian candies. If you’re a sucker for chocolate-covered cherry candies like we are, it may be pretty high on your list, too. And before you think this is just your average cherry candy, you should know that the filling also includes coconut.

MacRobertson’s created the first Cherry Ripe in 1924, making it the oldest chocolate candy bar in Australia. However, Cadbury has owned the brand since 1967. There are several ideas about where the name could have come from, including a 17th-century song or various books and movies from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

At one time, Cherry Ripe was Australia’s favorite chocolate bar, but it has lots of competition these days. Still, if you’re in Australia, you can enjoy it in several formats, including an ordinary bar, a double-dipped bar, a twin pack, or as minis.

We already mentioned musk-flavored candy when we talked about Melbourne Rock Candy. However, for the full experience, musk sticks seem to be the way to go. While not everyone likes eating candy that smells and tastes like perfume, it’s certainly one of those must-try-at-least-once experiences.

Not only is the intensely perfumey flavor divisive on this one, but the texture is as well. It manages to be both chalky and slightly chewy at the same time, in the same neighborhood as conversation hearts. While this might scare some people away, it drives our curiosity. After all, it’s a flavor that has been around in sweets in the Middle East since medieval times, with fans not only enjoying how it tastes but also its breath-freshening qualities. While today’s candy uses synthetic musk, those early musky sweets utilized musk from real musk deer. 

Musky “kissing comfits” (or sweets) had already fallen out of fashion in England by the time musk sticks started to gain popularity in Australia in the early 1900s. They were even popular as birthday cake decorations. Today’s musk sticks come in long, pink, star-shaped cylinders. Numerous brands sell musk sticks, like Big Lolly, Coles, Cooks Confectionery, The Lolly Co., Lolliland, and Fyna.

Mars Pods are pod-shaped candies with a rounded, crunchy wafer shell bottom and a flavored cream enclosed inside a top layer of chocolate. This cleverly-named candy is from the Mars candy company, which means that it has lots of already-existing chocolate candies under its belt, but that hasn’t stopped the company from dreaming up new ones.

There have been rumors that this candy was inspired by the dangerous and viral Tide Pod challenge. However, the challenge started in 2018, while the candies have been out since at least 2005. So, it’s not that kind of pod, although it looks quite similar. 

Mars Pods have come in a wide assortment of flavors. Fans of the candy have seen all sorts of varieties, like honeycomb bites, mint slice, cookies and cream, cherry bite, and toffee time. Plus, they’ve come in Mars-brand candy bar flavors like Snickers, Twix, and — of course – Mars bars.

One final candy that we really wish we could get in the U.S. is Haigh’s Chocolates. These fine chocolates have been made in a family-owned chocolate factory in Adelaide since 1915. The company only sells its chocolates in its own stores in its home city of Adelaide as well as in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney, with no plans to go international. However, you can buy some of its chocolate candies online, but only within Australia. The exclusivity makes these chocolates all the more desirable.

The company has quite a lot of flavors, with some of its bestsellers looking very Australian to American eyes. For example, there are both plain and peppermint milk chocolate frogs, which are reminiscent of the original design for Freddo Frogs. Other very-Australian favorites include milk chocolates filled with black licorice, and the milk chocolate speckles. The list of offerings is quite long, and includes everything from truffles and nut clusters to ginger bars and fruity cream-filled chocolates. While there are lots of great chocolate brands available in the U.S., we just wish this were one of them.