#22 | How Squid Game's Dalgona Candy is Trending on Social?
The toffee-like honeycomb candy might be brittle, but its popularity is rock solid.
Goodbye dalgona coffee and hello dalgona candy. The nostalgic South Korean street snack saw its popularity skyrocket after it was featured in the massive Netflix hit, Squid Game, which has become the most-watched show on the streaming platform.
The honeycomb candy is made from stirring melted sugar in a small pot placed over fire. The molten mixture is then frothed up with a pinch of baking soda. The brittle candy disc is then flattened and imprinted with geometric shapes.
The candy is played in Ppopgi, a Korean childhood game, in which players snag another free candy if they manage to carve shapes out from the candy. In Squid Game, breaking the brittle candy meant death.
This isn’t the first time a movie/TV show has sent appetites soaring for a dish - American comedy-drama Chef got everyone hankering for Cuban sandwiches and who could forget the gastronomical scenes in Ratatouille?
Let’s see how the popularity of the toffee-coloured candy fared on social media over the past week - when the volume of social posts on dalgona candy started to spike as much as people’s blood sugar levels. (Personally, I am just relieved that Mid-Autumn Festival was slightly after Squid Game was launched - or we would be inundated with Squid Game-inspired mooncakes.)
Over the past month, there were 20,000 mentions of “dalgona candy” or “dalgonacandy” on social media - the volume spiked on Oct 14, with more than 2,200 posts on that day. News and lifestyle websites, including The New York Times, started running recipes on making dalgona candy at home and nuggets of facts and history on the candy.
In Indonesia, a cafe has been injected with a second dose of life from recreating some of the games in Squid Game in its space, including the dalgona candy challenge.
Getting Emotional Over Dalgona Candy
Joy is the top sentiment captured in social posts related to dalgona candy. Many fans of the show expressed happiness from making nailing the seemingly easy-peasy dalgona candy recipe in their home kitchens. Many made the candy and survived.
Some felt frustrated from seemingly everyone jumping on the dalgona candy bandwagon and the plot surrounding the candy in the episode, while some found it cumbersome to make the candy at home.
Online conversations on “dalgona candy” stir up a mixed bag of emotions close to a one month after the Squid Game debuted on Sep 17. Social posts with the “joy” sentiment saw a visibly greater uptake in early October - when most people might have binge-watched their way through the series. “Anger” posts started appearing in mid-October when more naysayers started throwing their 2 cents’ worth of opinion.
*Data from Cision Social Listening, powered by Brandwatch, a digital consumer intelligence platform. Data was taken from Twitter, Tumbr, forums, Reddit, news websites and blogs.
Stay hungry for the next round of The Potluck by subscribing the newsletter below:
Follow me on Instagram (@kenneats). Got news? Get in touch at kennethgohsz@gmail.com. Tuck into previous editions of The Potluck here.