Before Samy Alí gave up his Michelin star and opened his next restaurant in a Lavapiés market, he was already surprising the customers at his Candela Restó with candies that numb the tongue.
“We started making them enriched with Timut pepper, a spice that produces a tingling and numbing sensation, to reset the palate and start with the desserts,” he says. And from there, after seeing the surprise it caused in his diners, he thought of enhancing the effect by adding electric flower.
Raúl Díaz, farmer and harvester of El jardinero y La Cocinera, along with Almudena Montero, supplies him from Toledo and explains that “the Acmella oleracea (the electric flower) when tasted causes a somewhat electric effect, like the little spark from a battery. It also stimulates the taste buds and makes them more receptive, magnifying the food. That’s why it has a lot of use in mixology as well,” he adds. And the devotion this plant and flower supplier feels for them, for many restaurants throughout Spain, is such that he asked Samy if he could make 500 electric flower candies for his wedding.
But he was not the only one; many customers, upon trying them at Doppelgänger, Samy Alí’s restaurant in the Antón Martín market (Santa Isabel, 5, Madrid), asked if they could buy some to take away. “People were amazed by the candy and started asking us for larger quantities for celebrations, company dinners, or events that exceeded two hundred candies.” All these requests changed his perspective, as it was no longer just a surprising course within a menu or the “shot” at the end of the meal taken by those who visit his restaurant, but there were people willing to buy the product by the hundreds to share.
That demand made him think that maybe there was something more behind that small sweet: “Why don’t we try to industrialize all this?” he wondered. Moreover, the idea had the business advantage that the product had already been tested with customers before becoming a business. “There was a real demand,” he emphasizes. At the end of 2025, he set up a company specifically to develop the electric candy with the particularity that, in this case, the raw material and the final product were connected. Raúl cultivated the electric flower in Toledo, from March to early November, and became part of the candy business alongside Samy.
The farmer, when talking about this plant, explains: “It is native to the Amazon, from countries like Brazil and Peru. I know three different varieties: one that has the flower bud — the top part — red and yellow, another completely yellow, and another that has only two or three petals. Originally, it was mainly a medicinal herb, a remedy used by the natives of the Amazon for oral ailments. It is really not a flower, but many tiny flowers; it belongs to the asteraceae family because they are composite flowers. It is a bud that, if we look closely, we realize it is actually composed of many tiny flowers.”
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The candy is based on a simple technique to explain and much more delicate to execute. Samy compares it to those homemade lollipops that some children made by letting sugar crystallize around a stick. “A sugar saturation,” he summarizes. “Water is boiled with sugar until a supersaturated solution is achieved and, when cooled, the excess sugar crystallizes. In our case, the water is boiled with electric flower and the mixture is poured into starch molds. The contact triggers crystallization and creates a kind of sugar capsule around the liquid interior, where we incorporate alcohol,” he explains.
But turning a restaurant preparation into a commercial product proved to be much more complicated. When he began the procedures to obtain the health registration, the problem arose and, according to the chef, during a health inspection he was told he could not directly use the electric flower as an ingredient in the candy. “I had created a company and a brand name based on a product I couldn’t use!” he recalls. For months he tried to find a solution. He tested formulas with dietary supplements and even fortified foods. Finally, he found a way through an aromatic preparation made from the plant. “It was a real odyssey, but we made it,” he sums up.
To make the candy they have a mechanism created for them, but he clarifies that it is not a fully automated industrial chain: “This is artisanal,” he insists. “We can make 1,000 a day on a long shift.” And sales have been growing cautiously. Until recently, they worked with a distributor only in Madrid, because it is a delicate product, but the online store just launched this summer and shipments are made cold to better control the product. “For now, I prefer to sell and distribute to 50 customers rather than 500,” he says. Before growing fast, he wants to make sure the candy arrives well at its destination.
There are three versions: whiskey, orange and cinnamon; tequila; and gin, although his intention is to gradually expand distribution. “We reinterpret century-old French recipes based on water, sugar, and 40-degree spirit to which we add different nuances such as orange zest, lemon, Sichuan pepper, and aromatic preparation of electric flower. And the tingling and numbing sensation is due to its high content of sanshool and spilanthol,” explains Samy. On the website, you must confirm you are over 18 to enter, as happens on alcoholic beverage pages. The can of 6 candies costs 14 euros and the one with 25 costs 50 euros.
This latest project by Samy Alí, like all those he has undertaken throughout his career, has not been without adventures from the start. It was born as a small interlude between dishes and desserts, became an object of desire for many customers, almost lost its fundamental ingredient due to regulatory issues, and ended up finding a formula that its creator sums up as “a fragile candy with a liquid heart.”