Canada’s grocery store shelves are filled with a seemingly endless supply of bizarre everyday items that will absolutely confuse American visitors.
Butter Tarts
Considered a delicacy, butter tarts are made with a buttery pastry shell filled with syrup, sugar, butter, and egg.
You’ll find them in the bakery section of every Canadian grocery store, but you won’t find them anywhere in the States. But many Canadians debate over whether they should contain raisins or pecans to enhance their flavor.
Coffee Crisp
This popular candy bar has layers of vanilla wafer and coffee-flavoured foam, dipped in milk chocolate.
Even though it’s manufactured by a multinational conglomerate, it is absurdly difficult to find in American supermarkets. It’s a Canadian lunchbox staple.
Shreddies Cereal
This is essentially a lattice-shaped whole-wheat piece of toast that you eat for breakfast. It’s been around forever and Canadians have loved it for generations.
It has an entirely different texture from American Chex. Those vintage “real diamond” commercials were Canadian’s secret inside joke.
Swiss Chalet Sauce
You can walk down just about any aisle in a Canadian grocery store and find a can or powdered packet of this mysterious dipping sauce. Made popular by Swiss Chalet, a rotisserie chicken chain found across Canada, the highly specific, herbal gravy has a tang that people either love or strongly dislike.
To many Canadians, it’s comfort gravy personified.
President’s Choice
Don’t mistake store brands for generic bargain-bin knockoffs here. President’s Choice (PC), our cultural icon-brand-within-a-brand, can take some credit for that.
Their “The Decadent” chocolate chip cookie outsells every name-brand cookie in Canada. You can walk into any Loblaws-affiliated grocery store and watch Americans’ jaws drop as Canadians viciously defend their private-label grub.
Red River
This is a traditional hot cereal consisting of cracked wheat, rye and flax brown seed.
Red River tastes earthy and has a gritty texture. Generations of Canadians have eaten it just to make it through Canadian winter mornings. The birdseed-like sludge is foreign to most Americans raised on creamy oatmeal or grits.
Hickory Sticks
These are tiny, matchstick-sized potato chips heavily flavored with artificial hickory smoke. Sold in an equally appropriately miniature, thin bag, Hickory Sticks are rigid and crunchy and have been a vending machine and grocery store standby for generations.
Americans cannot understand why you would want to eat something that looks like a bag full of cigarette butt-sized bits of smoky wood.
Aero Bars
Americans are accustomed to their chocolate bars being extremely dense. However, Canadian candy aisles overflow with Aero bars, which are candy bars that are literally filled with miniature air pockets.
The chocolate is manufactured to melt quickly and feel ultra-light on your tongue. Americans typically think the texture is weird at first and feel like they are basically getting charged for a chocolate bar that’s 50% air.
Clamato Juice
Clamato is your basic grocery-store shelf staple. It’s a commercially prepared beverage consisting of reconstituted tomato juice concentrate, sweetened with sugar and spices, then doused with a flavoring of dried clam broth.
Canadians purchase it by the gallon in order to concoct their national drink, the Caesar.