Cafés in Sweden Stockholm

Five bans and a royal experiment

Sweden banned coffee five times between 1756 and 1817, and the last ban ran until 1822.⁵ The first was pushed through the Riksdag by the peasant estate, in retaliation for a ban on distilling brandy at home; it was lifted in 1769 and replaced by an import duty.³ The worry was the economy more than health. Offenders could lose their cups and dishes, and later penalties included prison.⁵

Gustav III tried to prove coffee harmful. He had a pair of identical twins, both prisoners under sentence, drink large daily amounts, one of coffee and one of tea. The king was assassinated in 1792, the two supervising doctors died next, and the tea drinker lived to 83. Nobody recorded when the coffee drinker died.⁵

From kafferep to the factory break

At first, the coffee itself was the fika; only later did the word come to mean the break and the small bite that goes with it.¹ Coffee was drunk mostly at home in the 1700s, and it went with the kafferep, gatherings where women met to do handicrafts. Regulated morning and afternoon breaks in factories did much to shape the modern habit.¹

A proper kafferep needed seven kinds of cookies, a custom known since the late 1800s. A hostess who baked fewer was thought stingy and one who baked more a show-off, and in 1945 the custom became the recipe book Sju sorters kakor (Seven kinds of cookies).⁶ Home coffee parties grew rarer in the late 1900s, and from the 1980s cafés took over as meeting places.¹

Kaffeost in the north

In the far north, coffee comes with cheese. Kaffeost (coffee cheese) is a fresh cheese of whole reindeer, goat or cow's milk, cut into cubes and dropped into hot coffee, where it softens and takes on the coffee's flavor.⁷ The EU gave it a protected designation of origin in 2025, for cheese made in Norrbotten, Västerbotten, Lappland, Jämtland, Härjedalen and Ångermanland.⁷

Its roots are in Tornedalen and northern Finland, and in Meänkieli, the Tornedalen language, it is kahvijuusto. Eaten plain, it squeaks against the teeth; in coffee it stops squeaking. The other way to eat it is on the side, with cloudberry jam.⁸

Roasters in Gävle, Karlstad and Helsingborg

Most of the coffee Swedes buy is roasted in three provincial towns. Gevalia, roasted in Gävle, has about 40% of the market, Zoégas of Helsingborg about 20% and Löfbergs of Karlstad about 15%.² Gevalia is the Latin name for Gävle. The Engwall trading house had roasted coffee since 1913 before launching the brand in 1920, and Gevalia is still roasted at Alderholmen.⁹

The Löfberg brothers founded their firm in Karlstad in 1906, and it is still family-owned, now in its third and fourth generations.¹⁰ Carlos Zoéga started trading coffee in Landskrona in 1881 and founded Zoégas in Helsingborg in 1886. Its dark Skånerost blend began in 1918 as Horns blandning, and in 2017 Zoégas held about 65.7% of Swedish dark-roast sales.¹¹

Stockholm

The capital took to coffeehouses early: by the first half of the 1700s, Stockholm had about fifty kaffehus.³ It is also home to the fourth of the big roasters, Arvid Nordquist, with about 9% of the market.²