How to Build the Perfect Pick and Mix: Six Rules for a Great Bag

Everyone thinks they know how to do a pick and mix. Then they get home, open the bag, and find it's two thirds cola bottles and a single, lonely fried egg.

A great bag isn't luck. It's built, the same way a good playlist is: a strong opener, a change of pace, one surprise, and something to finish on. We mix sweets all day, every day, so here are the rules we use ourselves.

Rule 1: Start with your heroes

Pick two or three sweets you'd happily eat a whole bag of. These are your backbone, and they should make up about half the mix. Don't be clever here. If it's fizzy cola bottles, it's fizzy cola bottles.

Rule 2: Add a contrast

The best handful has an argument in it. Sweet against sour. Soft against chewy. Fruity against creamy. If your heroes are all fizzy, add something mellow like a milk bottle or a foam banana. If they're all soft, add something with a sour coat to wake the bag up.

Rule 3: Mix your textures

Flavour gets all the attention, but texture is what stops a bag getting boring. Try to cover at least three of these:

• Gummy: the firm, bouncy chew. Gold bears, giant strawberries, jelly snakes.
• Foam: soft and light. Fried eggs, milk bottles, foam bananas.
• Fizzy: anything in a sugar and sour coat.
• Chewy: the long haul. Bon bons, Black Jacks, Fruit Salad.
• Chocolate: mice, Jazzies, nibbles.
• Hard boiled: the slow one, for when the film still has an hour to go.

Rule 4: Think in colour

You eat with your eyes first, so give them something to look at. Something blue, something pink, something that glitters.

It's also why themed bags work so well: all red, all blue, a bag in somebody's team colours. The Frost Bite is ten blue raspberry sweets in one icy blue bag, and it never fails to get a reaction.

Rule 5: Put in one wildcard

One sweet you've never tried. That's the rule. It might be a Swedish foam skull, a freeze dried sweet that crunches, or something American you've only ever seen in films.

Sometimes it's just a nice change. Sometimes it becomes your new hero, and the whole bag gets rebuilt around it. That's how a pick and mix habit keeps moving.

Rule 6: Get the size right

With us, every sweet comes in its own pouch, so a home built mix is made for sharing. As a guide:

• A 300g Teaser Pouch of each sweet is plenty. Five Teasers come to a kilo and a half, which fills a big bowl for a party or keeps a family going for a good few film nights.
• A 1kg Signature Pouch is for your heroes. The ones you never want to run out of.
• Only feeding one or two? A ready made mix gives you up to ten sweets in a single 300g pouch.

Three bags we'd build

• The crowd pleaser: fried eggs, giant strawberries, gold bears, fizzy bubblegum bottles, milk bottles and jelly snakes. Something for everyone and nothing left at the bottom.
• The fizz head: fizzy cola bottles, fizzy blue raspberries, fizzy twin cherries and sour dummies, with foam bananas to cool things down.
• The time traveller: Black Jacks, Fruit Salad, flying saucers, pear drops, white mice, and a gobstopper for the journey home.

How to do it at Candy4U

Every sweet in our range, 600+ of them, is sold on its own by the pouch. Choose your heroes from our individual sweets, add your contrast and your wildcard, then tip the lot into a bowl at home and you've built a pick and mix exactly the way you like it. Orders placed before 2pm Monday to Friday are dispatched the same day.

Or let us do it for you

Short on time? Our ready made mixes are built the same way. The Hall of Fame is the all time greats in one bag. The Insider Edit is the six sweets our team eats on shift.

And if you'd like to see how the people who do this for a living build theirs, Ian's Mix is our founder's own bag: sour apples, fizzy blue raspberries, wine gums and jelly beans, with foam bananas and Dracula teeth for the retro hit.

Choose your sweets