Daniel Andersson, owner of a grocery store in Luleå, eats sour strömming himself. He strictly adheres to the tradition of not selling until the shop opens on the morning of the third Thursday in August.
The cans are rolled out in the store and the queue is usually long.
– It’s usually really festive, laughs Daniel Andersson, and continues:
– It is the day traditionally when the fish has fully matured.
Sales already started
Another shop in Luleå, on the other hand, started selling the beloved surströmming just over a week ago.
– People ran in to get there first. I was almost afraid that they would run each other down, says supermarket manager Peter Andersson.
According to him, it is for reasons of space that the store has chosen to sell earlier.
Surströmming is in short supply
In some of the shops in Luleå, they also have restrictions on how many cans you can buy. That’s because the Norrbothnia supplier BD-fisk only got 27 tons of the desired 40.
The food giant Axfood has chosen to stop its sour flounder sales in Hemköp and Willys because the World Health Organization (WHO) has redlisted the fish.