this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
653 points (99.5% liked)
Buy European
1494 readers
2072 users here now
Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What food from the USA would anyone in Europe actually want? Genuine question.
I'm imagining peanut butter, BBQ sauce, pumpkin pie filling, and maybe a few breakfast foods like cream of wheat. Not all of our foods are terrible nightmares, they're just either available in different aisles or not super popular to justify being everywhere.
The intersection of "American", "novelty" and "popular enough to import but not enough to fully stock" is probably mostly candy, pop tarts and Lucky charms.
https://www.thetimes.com/article/us-trade-war-german-peanut-butter-lovers-feel-crunch-q55bs3r8t
The last time trump was around and pulled this type of shit peanut butter was one of the things people had issues with, since the US produces a lot of peanuts and peanut butter.
I'm German and I suspect it's a bit cringier than that. Out of the products you listed peanut butter is the only one that's available virtually everywhere. You can get all of the other stuff as well but mostly online or at dedicated candy shops. The only other item I can think of is Jack Daniel's and probably some other spirits. So what was sold in the US section? The answer is probably German made stuff that's stereotypically American. This may include spray cheese, creatively flavored bbq sauces, other condiments like relish, brioche burger and hot dog buns, cookies, brownies, muffins, donuts and my favorite because you guys don't even eat that: actual plastic buckets filled with sweet popcorn.
Heh, fair enough. I took a look at some pictures of US grocery sections at European stores and applied the huristic of:
Based on that metric, I concluded there was a contingent of Europeans who viewed American peanut butter, BBQ sauce and hot porridge as superior enough to justify spending extra on. That spray cheese was correctly regarded as a disgusting novelty, and that pop tarts, lucky charms and marshmallow fluff are noveltys that are "fine".
Wouldn't have expected you to put relish there though! I kinda figured that was one everyone had that they tweaked a little for regional taste, like mustard.