People in the UK care about sweets, don’t they? Put up the price of a Freddo or some other chocolate bar that everyone pretends to love, and there’s uproar. Take a stupid sweet out of a variety box of chocolate, and there’s riots. Remove Percy Pigs from the shelves and I will personally and immediately flip every table in a 200 metre radius. Sorry, but that’s the only one I really care about. OK, and Skittles.
Anyway, we love our sweeties, our naughty treats, our yummy bummies or whatever it is you call them - the message is: don’t mess with them. If they aren’t broke, don’t fix them.
Well, unfortunately, and to their brief detriment, Quality Street decided to snatch the Toffee Deluxe from its tub this time last year, and let me tell you, there was utter chaos. Personally, I didn’t even notice because I’m trying really hard to cut sweets out of my diet (apart from Percy Pigs and Skittles, obviously, I’m not a zombie).
Here are two examples of enraged, pitchfork-waving tweets from the forgotten year of ‘2016’:
So yeah, people were a smidgen displeased about the powers that be swapping their admittedly lovely, chewy, juicy Toffee Deluxe and replacing it with Honeycomb Crunch, which I assume is merely a tiny version of a Crunchie, which is in the bottom five of all chocolate bars. Weird decision, but it was made regardless, and the public revolted. On Twitter, anyway.
BUT! Nostalgia only needs to be a year old nowadays, so they’re bringing it back to satiate the thousands of fans who have forgotten it even existed! You can see it now: crowds of sweet-eaters loudly declaring a misplaced and potentially bogus love for a tiny bit of chocolate. Me? I will probably eat one of these at Christmas, which is when they’re rolling it out, but it wouldn’t have been ruined if I didn’t.
Still, Jonathan Smith, Senior Brand Manager for Quality Street, said:
“The reaction to Honeycomb Crunch replacing Toffee Deluxe last year was incredible and, although a lot the comments were tongue in cheek, it was obvious that there is still a great deal of fondness for the Toffee Deluxe out there.
“Quality Street is a brand that is all about bringing families and friends together through the love of each person’s individual favourite sweet so we are delighted to be keeping both sweets in the assortment and giving consumers even more choice, moving from 12 to 13 different sweets overall.”
So in case the new Honeycomb Crunch was your favourite for some reason, don’t fret your little foil-wrapped undies about it - they’re keeping it in there, too. So you’ll have 13 different sweets for the price of 12, which would be great, if the box wasn’t exponentially shrinking every decade - soon it’ll be a little pill-box of tiny, Smint-sized chocolates, and it’ll cost £3,500. Then you definitely won’t have enough money for a Freddo.
(Image: Nestle)