A short history of British sweets

For most of British history sweets were medicine. Confectioners and apothecaries were often the same trade, and sugar was an expensive import used to make bitter remedies swallowable. Liquorice was grown at Pontefract for coughs. Aniseed settled the stomach. Clove numbed toothache. Barley sugar, boiled with barley water, was given for travel sickness. The flavours of a traditional British sweet shop, mint, aniseed, clove, liquorice, treacle, are a direct inheritance from the medicine cabinet, which is why so many of them taste medicinal to a modern palate. They were meant to.

Two things made the British sweet. Cheap refined sugar arrived after the Napoleonic wars and the price collapsed. And metal drop rollers appeared, which could stamp out thousands of identical sweets an hour where before every one had been cut by hand. Suddenly a working family could afford sweets regularly, and an entire industry grew up to supply them, concentrated in the north of England. Pear drops, fruit drops, humbugs, rosy apples, aniseed twists and mint imperials all date from this moment. So does the comfit trade that gave us gobstoppers, aniseed balls and liquorice comfits, using a panning technique that had been used for sugared almonds since the Middle Ages.

Bassett's of Sheffield made Liquorice Allsorts, reputedly after a salesman dropped a tray of samples on a customer's floor in 1899. Maynard made wine gums, in a family so teetotal that the founder's father objected to the name. Fryers of Lancashire made something in 1864 that looked more like babies than bears, and sold it, with Victorian humour, as Unclaimed Babies. Swizzels began in London in the 1920s and was evacuated to Derbyshire during the war, where it still is, making Love Hearts, Refreshers, Parma Violets and Drumsticks. Barratt made Black Jacks and Fruit Salads, four for a penny, which is how two generations learned the value of money.

Sweets were rationed from 1942 and stayed rationed for eleven years, longer than the war itself. An attempt to lift it in 1949 collapsed under demand and had to be reversed. It ended for good on 4 February 1953 and the shops sold out in days. Bassett's Peace Babies, launched in 1918 to mark the end of the first war, had stopped during the second and came back in 1953 renamed Jelly Babies. The generation that grew up counting out a ration treated sweets differently for the rest of their lives, and the strength of the nostalgia market in Britain today traces directly back to it.

The fifties and sixties gave us the sweets people now call retro. Foam bananas and shrimps, made by whipping air into sugar and gelatine. Flying saucers, invented in Antwerp by a communion wafer maker whose church changed the rules on where wafers could be made. Bon bons, chocolate mice, milk bottles, fried eggs. Chewits arrived in 1965 with a dinosaur who ate landmarks on television. Drumsticks arrived in 1957 with a raspberry and milk flavour that nobody has ever explained and no other country has copied.

Hans Riegel founded Haribo in Bonn in 1920 and in 1922 made a fruit gum shaped like the trained bears that performed at German street fairs. The Gold Bear became the most copied sweet in the world, and every gummy shark, crocodile, snake and dolphin in a British sweet shop exists because of it. Maoam followed in 1930. Trolli introduced the gummy worm in 1981, designed to be slightly revolting on the correct assumption that children would love it. German sweets are firmer than British ones for one reason only, they spend longer in the drying room.

American sweets are sweeter, softer and heavier on flavour than British ones, and they use corn syrup where we use glucose, largely a matter of which crop each country subsidises. M and M's were created in 1941 after Forrest Mars saw soldiers eating shell coated chocolate that would not melt. Jelly Belly made the first bean flavoured all the way through in 1976. Nerds arrived in 1983. Jolly Ranchers, Lemonheads, Mike and Ike, Airheads, Tootsie Rolls and Hershey's Kisses all reached Britain through imports, and blue raspberry came with them, a flavour invented purely so that soda makers could tell their red flavours apart.

Until the 1970s almost every sweet aimed at sweetness alone. Then American manufacturers discovered that children would buy anything that made their friends pull a face. The sour category grew through the 1990s into an arms race, with Toxic Waste selling sweets in a drum designed to look like industrial waste and printing a warning on the packet that doubled as the advertising. Sour is now one of the largest sections of any pick and mix, and it is the only category in food where the product being unpleasant is the point.

Woolworths made pick and mix a British institution and its collapse in 2008 took the format with it from the high street. What came back was different, smaller shops, specialist ranges, imported Scandinavian and American sweets alongside the traditional ones, and eventually online. Sweden, meanwhile, had been doing it better for fifty years. A 1950s public health campaign there encouraged people to limit sweets to Saturdays, and lördagsgodis became a national tradition that made Sweden one of the biggest per person sweet markets in the world.

Three things are driving the trade. Dietary ranges, as vegan and gluten free stopped being a niche and became a requirement. Nostalgia, as the generation that grew up on penny sweets reached the age where they buy them for their own children. And video, which has changed which sweets sell and even how they are designed, because crunch is now specified as a sound as well as a texture. Freeze dried sweets, a category that did not exist in 2019, were created entirely by people filming themselves eating them.

A boiled sweet is still sugar and glucose syrup heated to 150 degrees. A comfit is still made by tumbling a centre in a rotating pan. A jelly is still poured into a tray of dried starch and left for days. The machinery is faster and the flavours are stranger, but the techniques in a modern sweet factory would be recognisable to a Victorian confectioner, and most of them would be recognisable to a medieval one.