The latest Instagram food trend is the hagabullar, a giant Swedish cinnamon bun from Café Husaren in Gothenburg, but it's too big to enjoy, leading to waste.
A New Giant Pastry Takes Over
Three years after the croissant XXL by acclaimed French pastry chef Philippe Conticini won hearts, a new influencer fad is ready to hit Instagram and TikTok. On a recent trip to Gothenburg, I visited the beautiful district of Haga, the city's oldest neighbourhood, and Café Husaren, the cosy wood-paneled spot that invented the massive 'hagabullar' cinnamon buns.
Stretching close to a foot from edge to edge, these enlarged treats are a significantly puffed-up, Instagram-friendly version of a good that is firmly baked into Swedish life. The average Swede eats cakes and pastry equivalent to 316 cinnamon buns per year, according to the country's tourist board, and the act of taking fika (a cake-and-food-focused period of time) is so important that two coffee breaks per day are an unwritten rule in many Swedish workplaces.
The Problem with Oversized Food
The hagabullar are simply too big to be enjoyable. They contain too much stuff. While it is undeniably fun to buy novelty-sized things, sometimes bigger is not always better. Particularly when it comes to food. The smaller something is, the stronger its ratio of surface area to innards is. The oversized croissants and hagabullar simply have too much inside and not enough outside to be tasty.
But then again, no one can tell that in an Instagram post. Nor can they see the waste that's left over. The overly doughy croissants left to the pigeons; the belly-busting hagabullar that prove too much for an influencer to handle; the bin full of unfinished lattes bought so people can pose next to a pink wall in LA.
A Longstanding Tradition and Its Waste
In fairness to Café Husaren, it's not only an elegant place with an array of absolutely delicious baked goods, but it's been selling the hagabullar for over 40 years. Far longer than the croissant XXL. Regardless, I was sad to see Swedes and tourists buying a hagabullar, snapping a pic and then discarding the majority of the sweet bun. Hagabullar sat, unloved, on several vacated tables close to mine.
Conticini's XXL croissant is advertised as feeding eight people, but in reality, it is often nibbled by one or maybe two influencers, photographed, and then dumped. All of this is in service of an algorithm that rewards extremes, whether that be the biggest, the most extravagant, or the grossest. It's designed to shock in its extremity, which means it is ripe for ridicule.
A Call for a Break
Juliette Moreno is a Cordon Bleu-trained chef whose videos making fun of these trends have won her more than 400,000 Instagram followers. Her most recent efforts have seen Juliette create a huge Minion cookie, Monster energy drink soufflé, rat meringues, and hot dogs boiled in the dishwasher. Her videos are funny because they take ideas that have been percolating on Instagram and TikTok to their most extreme possible end.
Around 645 million people didn't have enough food to eat in 2025, according to the WHO, but the world produces food for two billion more people than currently exist. On a planet where Sudan and Gaza are currently facing famine, maybe we should give the big food videos a break for a while.
