Meet Denmark’s king of liquorice Johan Bülow

Looking down an open vat full of dark brown liquorice mass is like staring into a bubbling tar pit. The so-called ‘Slow Crafted’ production takes four to five hours of cooking before the sticky liquorice mass is done, explains Lakrids by Bülow founder and creative director Johan Bülow. At the company’s production facility on the outskirts of Copenhagen, the air is filled with the sweet smell of liquorice, which emanates from the cooker. It’s the centrepiece of the production: a steaming, stainless steel contraption, noisily extruding piping hot black liquorice mass.

“Try it,” says Bülow, offering me a chunk of the still hot black liquorice snaking onto the conveyor belt in long, black rows. It provides an instant hit of sweetness and the kind of intense saltiness that puts a sweat on your forehead. While Scandinavians delight in the dark concoction, people from other parts of the world find the taste less appealing. For Danes, a joke that never gets old is giving foreign visitors a taste of strong Danish liquorice and then revelling in their disgust. But that was never the intention for 38-year-old Bülow. Rather, 15 years ago, he set out on a quest to make the world love liquorice. “I remember back in the day when people would try it and then spit it out. I couldn’t sleep at night,” he says.

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Against all odds, Bülow succeeded. Lakrids by Bülow made its founder Denmark’s king of liquorice, a half-billionaire, and almost broke him along the way. But we’ll get to that. First, let’s get some facts straight about liquorice. Liquorice has an age-old history as a medicinal plant. It was used in China 5,000 years ago and was even discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt. The liquorice extract and powder come from the roots of the plants which grow in abundance in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iran.

The saltiness that Scandinavians love comes from added ammonium chloride while the inherent sweetness comes from glycyrrhizic acid. This acid is what gives liquorice its special taste, but it can also lead to high blood pressure, meaning that liquorice should not be consumed in excessive quantities. Tastewise, liquorice is a complex thing. “Liquorice has 328 different chemical compounds of smell and taste,” says chemist and professional ‘super-taster’ Lisbeth Ankersen from InnovaConsult. She’s a food lecturer and expert on taste and sensory science, consulting for food giants like Ferrero. “Liquorice has this warming mouth feel with notes of camphor, mint, vanilla, caramel, roses, violets, grass, raspberries and lemon, which explains why chefs often like to use it in combination with berries and citrus,” she says.

Although it’s grown far from Scandinavian shores, liquorice has somehow gained a foothold here. The Swedes and Finns are crazy about super-salty strong liquorice, while in Iceland, they’ve been coating it with chocolate for decades. What’s the appeal? While Ankersen can easily describe the taste, she calls it a “paradox” that Scandinavians have such a preference for the candy. “Our food culture is normally based on things we can grow here, but liquorice has absolutely no connection to that,” she says. “The same can be said about our consumption of coffee and chocolate, which Scandinavians are also top consumers of globally.”

It wasn’t always this way. Before the 1900s, liquorice was strictly medicinal, and sold at the pharmacy as a remedy for coughs and sore throats. However, around the beginning of the century, the Danes began importing liquorice candies from Germany and England, who were the first to mix the liquorice extract with sugar, syrup, and starch to create the classic black liquorice that we know today.

Around 100 years later, in 2006, 22-year-old Bülow set out on his liquorice quest in humble surroundings: in the kitchen at his mother’s house on the small Danish island of Bornholm. At the time, Bülow was working as a restaurant manager in Copenhagen, but what he really wanted was to start his own business. What he needed was a product. It was after speaking to his uncle, a hard candy maker on Bornholm, that Bülow got hooked on the idea of elevating liquorice confectionery into a gourmet product.

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Problem was, he didn’t have a clue about where to start. Still, he quit his job and took his girlfriend, his limited savings, and a 10,000 euro loan from his parents, and went to Bornholm to start cooking up a superior liquorice. “I think it drives me when people say ‘you can’t do that’. Then I want to be able to say ’oh yes, I can’,” says Bülow.

After nights and nights of unsuccessful Googling for liquorice recipes, he tried calling some of the Danish confectionery giants for help. Alas, he soon found out that the confectionery business is a monolith shrouded in secrecy. A world of closely-guarded recipes and non-disclosure agreements. “They would just laugh at me. And today, I understand. I mean, if you knew how much a recipe for a well-known confectionery product is worth,” he says. “We are talking about products that have been consumers’ preferred taste for years and years.”

He thought he had cracked it when he found some confectionery specialists from Australia who agreed to offer their expertise. Flying in from Australia with their old liquorice oven, they cooked with Bülow day and night for two weeks, to no avail. But when Bülow was introduced to Danish confectionery maker Tage Kusk and his German colleague Wolf Waldner, he finally got his break. Waldner, a man with 35 years of liquorice experience and, according to Bülow, a nose so delicate that he can smell when a batch of liquorice had been cooked exactly long enough, was precisely the man up to the task. The two experts spent three months working with Bülow on what became his first original recipe.

“I was willing to do everything to make it,” says Bülow. By that time, he had spent all his money and worked himself tirelessly for one and a half years. Finally, he was able to put his product on the shelves in an interim summer store on Bornholm. On the first day, he sold out in two hours, and in the years that followed, the liquorice train became a runaway. Bülow and his brand rose to confectionery fame.

What made Bülow’s product different from others on the market, was his idea of ‘sugar-coating the pill’ by covering the liquorice in chocolate. That’s been a thing in Iceland for decades, but for the Danes it was something new. It even made top chefs rediscover liquorice’s culinary potential. Take, for instance, Torsten Vildgaard, formerly René Redzepi’s righthand man and R&D head chef at Noma. He still thinks liquorice has great culinary value.

“Liquorice has this deep, salty, sweet taste with a bit of umami. A touch of it adds depth and substance. It’s like adding a bit of salt when making vanilla ice cream. But dosing carefully is key,” says Vildgaard, immediately dreaming up dishes like yoghurt mousse with rhubarb and a touch of raw liquorice, lemon tart with meringue and grated raw liquorice, and white chocolate par fait with roses, blackcurrants, and sweet liquorice.

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For Bülow, the success did not come without sacrifice. In 2012, he found himself working 100-hour weeks. Building a brand, sitting in meetings, but also still being the guy on the floor cooking liquor ice and doing the night time cleaning. He was so busy that he would calculate how much time he could save by optimising everyday activities. Like ironing a shirt while brushing his teeth, all while waiting for the shower water to run warm. “That’s how my whole day went,” he says. “It was totally absurd.”

One day, every thing went black. “I couldn’t feel my face,” Bülow recalls. He spent three or four months away from operations and slowly made his way back, coming in for half an hour at a time. No fun at all, but a necessary learning experience, he says. “I realised that you can actually die from this,” says Bülow, who got his priorities straight before re-entering the fray — this time at 40 hours a week, allowing much more time for his wife and kids.

In 2016, he sold most of his shares in the company to Valedo, a Swedish investment fund. The sale made him a multi-millionaire overnight. Of course, being financially independent is nice, but that’s not the end of his mission. Bülow says his dream is to make Lakrids by Bülow a Danish brand as iconic as Bang & Olufsen “There’s still a lot of passion. I like development and doing business,” he says. “And I still love to let people taste and see the expressions on their faces.”