Do you know how a humbug gets its stripes? They wrestle them in, literally. In
the sweet factory a great copper vat of sugar, glycerine, colour and
flavouring is heated at 145C. Then it is poured on to a table where two
muscular men pound it and pull it into a great, 30 kg lump the size of a
pillow. They get a smaller lump — the stripes, in mint, fruit or sherbert —
and push and pull at that until one lump is ready to rest on the other. Then
they are folded together, stretched and fold again.
With the sugar still at 100C this is as sweaty as doing press-ups in a sauna.
The sweet factory staff (we won’t call them Oompa-Loompas, they don’t really
like it) work the molten sugar bare-handed, so they can judge the heat and
texture; I wore thick silicon gloves. And the process gets more physical —
eventually we were throwing the melded lump at each other, letting it
stretch longer and longer, the surface getting glossier and the pink and red
stripes emerging like a Tory squire’s shirt.
Eventually we dumped our lump in a machine that stretches it until it is a 10m
snake no wider than my thumb. And then, spurting out of the far end, come
the humbugs, little red and pink jewels. Strawberry sherberts. My daughter
and I both eat one, still warm from the machine.
Ernie Nyham, who has worked at the Tangerine factory in York since 1966,
examined the humbug we’d made. It doesn’t look like it used to, he says.
“You could paint your motor with the old colours”. His boss, Tony Wade,
another old hand, agrees. “It’s a dull-looking sweet. That’s the trade off
with natural colours — the greens are paler, the bright red is no good.
We’ve had to stop making cherry scones completely, and we’ve had awful
trouble with Turkish delight.” But neither Lulu or I are worried about the
look of the thing: the strawberry flavour is good and the sherbert is tangy.
We’re mainly wondering how many we’ll get to take home.
We’re here because this factory, which makes 1,000 tonnes of sweets each week
for most of the major supermarkets, has abandoned all artificial flavourings
and colourings. These included the notorious azodyes, still legal, which are
derived from coal tar, provide brilliant reds and “sunset yellow”, and make
my eczema and asthma-prone five-year-old come out in a rash. According to
research done for the government’s Food Standards Agency, if ingested with
sodium benzoate — a preservative in many soft drinks and colas — the azodyes
will make children hyperactive.
But so far this sweet has not doing anything except maintain Lulu’s
blissed-out smile. That has pretty much permanently in place since we set
off for York, feeling like Charlie Bucket and his grandpa, in possession of
golden tickets to Mr Wonka’s factory. When we arrive, Lulu is told that she
is the first child ever to be allowed in the Tangerine factory, whose
history, under different names, stretches back to 1833. In her
specially-made lab coat she gets to design her own humbug mix — mint and
caramel — and turn it into candy canes and seaside lollies. She is in heaven.
There has been a small revolution in sweet making in the past two years. Led
by Marks & Spencer, all the major supermarkets have now abandoned
artificial flavourings and colours in sweets and most of their cakes. The
big brand names are phasing them out as well, though some, such as Cadbury
and Nestlé, are proving bizarrely slow about it. The Government asked the
manufacturers to get rid of the azodyes as long ago as 2007. But there is
still Sunset Yellow in Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, Cadbury’s Roses chocolates and
Maynard’s wine gums — as well as many of the lower-shelf sweets you see in
newsagents. This though the science is strong enough to lead to bans on many
of the azodyes in other countries. From next year, under EU rules, packets
containing what campaigners call the “dirty six” dyes will be obliged to
carry a health warning.
The chemicals could, Tony Wade admits, have been chucked out years ago. “We
held on to the artificial colours because they are easier to use. They’re
the same every time you mix them, and the shelf-life is longer. With natural
colours every batch is different.” There is a gap, of course, between what
some manufacturers call “natural” and what you or I might. Rowntree’s Fruit
Pastilles uses “carminic acid”, as a red: it is natural in that it is made
from crushing up real beetles. Nestlé’s Smarties state “No artificial
colours or flavours” on the packet, though in the ingredients list is
titanium dioxide, a white pigment which is used to enhance colour. Wade
wouldn’t call that natural and he wouldn’t use it in his factory: “It’s not
nice at all. They use it in house paints.”
Natural fruit-based flavourings, though, are a great move forward, welcome
among the veteran sweetmakers at Tangerine. The tastes, they agree, are very
good. Even “milk bottles” are made with real milk, now, they boast and the
cola bottles — Britain’s favourite sweet — are “natural cola”.
The change is obvious on the back of the packets: where once you’d have seen a
cluster of E-numbers and acids, there are now names from the garden. Take M&S’s
Colin the Caterpillar — a new launch the company hopes may become as
phenomenally popular as Percy Pig (see box). Colin, a 5cm multicoloured
worm, contains “Lemon, Safflower, Grape, Blackcurrant. Apple, Spirulina.”
The last is actually an algae — the crucial natural ingredient that gave the
world back the blue Smartie.
There is no question that these sweets taste better; I love Colin the
Caterpillar, and I can convince myself that my kids are actually doing
themselves good when they chew on him (so long as they brush their teeth).
But natural isn’t all fine: I have a nostalgia for the industrial tang of the
classic pear drop, which used the artificial flavouring isoamyl acetate, a
chemical also used to bond wing fabrics in aircraft. It’s replacement, malic
acid from apples, just doesn’t taste right. The shops’ demand for sweets
with less salt, to suit another middle-class health obsession, causes Tony
Wade endless grief: salt is crucial to getting toffees, for a start, to
taste right. And Tangerine’s modern sherbert fountain for M&S, all
plastic to satisfy health regulations, is a sad travesty of the paper tube
and liquorice chimney of my childhood. How can you make a proper mess with
the sherbert now?
Nostalgia and sweets go hand-in-hand and at the moment “retro sweets” are a
food marketing phenomenon. Look at the carnival poster typography of M&S’s
new range, or the “tuck shop favourites” in a new line that Waitrose has
decided, for reasons best known to itself, to call “Monty Bojangles”. Billy
Bunter is back — and supermarkets such as M&S are relaunching
Pick’n’Mix stalls to please him.
Marks & Spencer confirms that sales of retro sweets such as foam shrimps,
cola cubes and rhubarb and custards at its shops are up 70 per cent on a
year ago: it believes the phenomenon is recession-related. Encouraged, M&S
has taken retro into other lines — relaunching roly-poly pudding, apple
strudel and Battenberg cake; later in the autumn it promises a range of
“retro sandwiches”, which may or may not include corned beef and Dairylea.
Another old-fashioned aspect of the boom is that jobs are actually coming back
to Britain, where there is still knowledge of how to hand make traditional
sweets. Tangerine is closing down production in Eastern Europe and hiring
staff in York, where it currently employs 250 people.
How far can the nostalgia sweet go, I ask? Tony Wade has been looking at the
original recipe books that the factory used in the 19th century: before long
he may, once again, be producing the Victorian bestsellers: mint imperials,
sugared almonds and sugar mice. With, you hope, real string for their tails.
Percy Pig
Go into any Marks & Spencer store and you’ll find the largest part of the
sweet section devoted to Percy Pig and his offspring. Percy is a roundish
face in two shades of pink, the texture somewhere between Blu-Tack and inner
tube. He is perhaps the most successful new sweet of modern times.
The pig’s birth came 16 years ago. He was invented by a M&S fruit
buyer, Bill Davies, who tried the prototypes out on his children. But it
wasn’t until the 2000s that Percy matured — now M&S sell
1,170 tonnes, or 10 million bags of Percy a year — which means we are eating
two of them every second.
Percy’s children have penetrated all levels of society. Vogue’s
What’s Hot list for 2008 listed Percy’s Piglets above Manolo Blahnik shoes.
His Facebook fan club has 31,000 members. Last month’s introduction of
Percy’s Tails (in a slightly fizzy version) is, says M&S, the most
successful sweet launch since that of Percy himself.
Percy is manufactured in Germany but he is, as they say, all natural: the
strawberry-ish flavour and his B&B bathroom pink colour comes from
apple, elderberry, grape, orange and blackcurrant. And he’s real pig: the
gelatine that is his base is made from pork bones.
The Top 20 Sweets
(according to an M&S poll of 4,000 adults in September 2009 )
1. Fizzy cola bottles
2. Cola bottles
3. Rhubarbs and custards
4. Wine gums
5. Black jacks
6. Jelly babies
7. Bon bons
8. Chocolate raisins
9. Chocolate éclairs
10. Turkish delight
11. Sherbet lemons
12. Flying saucers
13. Aniseed balls
14. Pear drops
15. Fruit salads
16. Chocolate limes
17. Chocolate coins
18. Percy Pigs
19. Liquorice allsorts
20. Apple and custards
Least liked sweets: Dolly watches came in as the least popular sweet
in the poll, followed by spaghetti gum and dolly beads.
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