Moment
The sour boom
When sweets stopped trying to be nice.
The story
Until the 1970s almost every sweet aimed at sweetness alone. American manufacturers then discovered that children would buy anything that made their friends pull a face, and the sour category was born. It grew through the 1990s into an arms race, with brands competing on how uncomfortable a sweet could be, and it reached Britain properly in the same decade. Sour is now one of the largest sections of any pick and mix, and it is the only category where the product being unpleasant is the selling point.
