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00:00Voila!
00:04Now, there's a process of eating a jelly baby.
00:08Some people start with the feet and some with the heads.
00:11For me, I prefer the heads.
00:14For some reason it makes them taste better.
00:16I don't know why, but that's the way we just do it.
00:20Excellent.
00:23Alan Palmer is no stranger to the world of sweets.
00:28He helped to make millions for Treeball Bassett
00:31and has a unique appreciation for the appeal of these sugary treats.
00:38I can't even tell you how many sweets there used to be
00:41and I couldn't even try to claim that I've tried most of them,
00:44but, I mean, there were hundreds if not thousands
00:46of different types of sweets.
00:48There was a lot of competition on the shelf.
00:51But the process of getting them to this stage
00:54is serious business and big business.
00:58For almost 200 years, the UK sweet business has been a profit gold mine,
01:07steeped in wondrous and creative treats.
01:10This is what sweet shops were all about.
01:13It's just pure joy.
01:15This business was born from endless innovation in sugar
01:18and grew a market of delicious variety.
01:22From gobstoppers to blackjacks to glacier mints,
01:25British sweets have come in an almost infinite array of shapes and sizes.
01:30But these Willy Wonka dreams soon turned into big money reality
01:34as growing titans battled for profits.
01:37On the face of it, selling sweets is a friendly, cosy business.
01:44But in practice, it's a war.
01:46Well, there was nothing to compare really, was there,
01:50with roundtree fruit pastels or fruit gums.
01:53High streets throughout the country were the battlegrounds
01:55in a raging sweeties civil war.
01:58The independent news agent was our lifeblood.
02:01But a surprise entry from Germany changed everything.
02:05Haribo blindsided us.
02:07We hate Haribo.
02:09We don't like them.
02:11Leaving the former British champions fighting to survive.
02:15This is not a market where the meek are allowed to prosper.
02:20This is the story of a battle for our sweet tooths.
02:24Sugar, we love it.
02:34It's not just an ingredient.
02:36Its addictive charms have fuelled an entire industry
02:39designed to give us one thing.
02:41Pleasure.
02:43There were small shops in pretty much every village
02:46and the kids would rush to the shops
02:49to buy some candy after their school day.
02:52And there were hundreds, if not thousands,
02:55of different types of sweets.
02:58Sweets have been booming since the Victorian age,
03:01spurred on by one of the 20th century's darkest events.
03:05The Second World War came along and had a massive impact
03:08on everybody in this country.
03:10Sugar was one of the ration products
03:12and so there was hardly any confectionery available
03:14during the war years, and in fact right through
03:16when rationing was lifted in the mid-'50s.
03:19And then, of course, suddenly, you know, sugar was cheaper,
03:21again, and available, and everybody wanted to buy candy and indulge.
03:28Desperate to get the sugar fix we'd missed in years of rationing,
03:32we went sweetie mad.
03:34And the market obliged.
03:36Almost anything you could dream up seemed to exist
03:38in a golden age of sugary success.
03:41Do you chew a sweet, suck it or crunch it, madam?
03:44Crunch it.
03:45Well, I suck it to start with and end up by crunching it.
03:48If it's a boil sweet, I suck it and then chew it and swallow it.
03:52Right?
03:53What about if it's a toffee then?
03:54Oh, that's got to be chewed, of course.
03:56Whether it was bonbons, fruit salads, candy lipsticks or love hearts,
04:03British sweets were iconic.
04:05You could look at the counter and it was filled with everything
04:08from jelly snakes to cola bottles.
04:11And for your 10p that you'd go in and you could say,
04:14I want one of those and two of those and put them into paper bags.
04:18And you came out feeling you had lots.
04:20The first thing you notice is the colours and the contrast.
04:25Soft, hard, bright colours, multi colours.
04:30So everyone is different.
04:32It's just the sheer variety and beauty of sweets, I think.
04:37They've got to feel irresistible, they've got to feel light-hearted
04:40and they've got to feel like fun.
04:44Out of the free-flowing post-war sugar market
04:47rose two companies that had consistently created very different products.
04:53Bassett's from Sheffield and from York, Roundtree's.
04:58Capitalising on the sugar boom,
05:00their sweets were specially selected and packaged
05:02to be instantly recognisable product brands.
05:06Sweets they hoped would make them number one in Britain's households.
05:12One of our oldest branded sweet products is the fruit pastel.
05:17They're a special product because they've got a very strong real fruit flavour.
05:24And that recipe and method of making them
05:26has been carefully guarded over nearly 150 years now.
05:32Sweetness of the sugar, sharpness of the fruit.
05:35Quite firm, certainly not soft.
05:38Really makes you want to chew it as you start on it.
05:41What was your favourite flavour?
05:42Blackcurrant.
05:44Unfortunately, the first one was a green one.
05:47I still like them, but not as much.
05:51Today we've come to the Roundtree Macintosh factory in York
05:57and we're going inside to see.
05:59Would you like to come with me?
06:01Roundtree Macintosh has been a giant of British confectionery for 150 years.
06:07The confectionery operations in the UK were started by Henry Isaac Roundtree when Henry Isaac bought a cocoa business.
06:16But in the 1870s trouble was brewing.
06:20Roundtree's cocoa business was struggling to turn a profit and he rapidly needed a sweet but cheap treat to offer his customers.
06:28He found what he was looking for across the English Channel.
06:31Henry Isaac Roundtree went and found a chap called Claude Gaget who worked in France who made pastilles.
06:38Roundtree persuaded the French sweet maker to secretly develop a fruity gummy pastille to suit British tastes.
06:46That's where Roundtree's fruit pastilles came from.
06:49They both saved the business and they're now probably one of the longest serving brands in the whole confectionery industry.
06:55Roundtree's genius was keeping the process of making his fruit pastilles a closely guarded secret.
07:03One that even those in the know still can't fully share.
07:10The old Roundtree company used to have a rule that all products had to have one difficult stage in them.
07:17So nobody else could come in with a knock off copy.
07:20You don't want somebody down the road making cheaper pastilles and taking your market.
07:26Dr Bill Edwards spent ten years creating gummies, lozenges and boiled sweets for Roundtree's.
07:32The old sugar confectionery has sugar in it and it has glucose syrup.
07:37He's agreed to show us the basic method for making fruit pastilles.
07:42At this point we're just dissolving the sugar.
07:45In a factory you would be using a steam heated pan.
07:49The advantage of steam heat is it's very controllable.
07:52In a fruit pastel the secret is a solution of gum acacia.
07:57It comes from a tree from a desert in places like the Sudan.
08:02One of its properties is you can make strong syrups out of it and that's really why it goes into sweets.
08:07It also protects the flavour of the sweet and of course it alters the texture.
08:14There are some elements that still remain top secret.
08:18There are only certain things I can talk about.
08:21The confectionery industry is very, very secretive.
08:24I mean more secrets have escaped from the places where they make nuclear weapons
08:28than have ever escaped from a major confectionery factory.
08:33At this point I'm going to add some orange oil.
08:37With citrus fruits you have the oil which is in the skin and that has a lot of the fruit flavour.
08:43Black currants normally work quite well.
08:46If you try and make a banana flavour it tends to be a bit iffy.
08:50To give them their famous firm and chewy texture,
08:53Roundtree's pastilles have to be air dried for seven days.
08:59You have a new taste sensation.
09:06It's actually quite nice.
09:10Yeah.
09:11Roundtree's competitors never got close to copying the secret recipe.
09:18And fruit pastilles were a huge hit with the British public.
09:26I must say I've always thought these things are delicious.
09:28And I can't say there's anything wrong with them today.
09:31I'm going to have another one.
09:36Credit where credit's due, fantastic product.
09:38They are just the ultimate reference point for a relatively hard gum.
09:45While Roundtree's had perfected the pastille, other iconic sweets had been created,
09:51sometimes purely by chance.
09:54George Bassett was one of the first people to get into sweet manufacturing.
10:00And inevitably they had created over the years hundreds of different products.
10:07George Bassett's most iconic product was created thanks to one clumsy mistake in 1899.
10:13It's called licorice.
10:15I wonder if you can guess what they're going to make.
10:19The only Bassett salesman of the day apparently knocked over a tray of sweets when he was taking them to a customer.
10:25And the customer thought, that's a fantastic idea.
10:28Let's sell them as a mixture.
10:29All sorts were popular, but they were licorice based and with fruit pastilles riding high, Bassett's decided to create a fruity gummy sweet of their own to take on Roundtree's.
10:43We strived for texture.
10:46Wine gums are supposed to be chewy and not too soft.
10:50And they've got to have that sort of fruity flavour to them.
10:55One of the great things about wine gums, that lovely smell, which I think is the glazing wax, carnauba I think it's called, which stops them sticking together.
11:04You can really feel it when you pick the wine gum up and it just slightly sticks to your finger and has that very, very specific smell to it.
11:17Roundtree's sort of think that they do the best fruity flavours. What do you think about that?
11:22Tribal Bassett think they do the best fruity flavours, so I suppose it's a matter of opinion.
11:29Everybody loves wine gums and pretty much everybody loves jelly babies as well.
11:32They were eaten by pretty much all age groups.
11:38Bassett's wine gums were a hit and soon overtook market leader fruit pastilles to become top dog.
11:47But their rivalry through the first half of the 20th century was a very gentle affair.
11:53Both companies felt there was more than enough profit to go round.
11:57Our competitors were really very good and they kept us on our toes.
12:00But it's a good industry, by and large, it was quite gentlemanly.
12:06But this green and pleasant Sweetieland was about to be torn apart.
12:12As a major corporation moved in, launching the opening shot in what would become a race for dominance.
12:18Mars.
12:21Sweets are quite a ruthless business.
12:24And everybody was trying to fight the same battle as Mars, but not with the same quality of ammunition really.
12:29Mars Limited have built their business on what people enjoy eating.
12:41And we continue to search for new and subtle flavours to appeal to the public palate.
12:44Mars had been a thorn in the side of British chocolate companies since the 1930s, then in the 60s they saw an opportunity to make a killing in sweets.
12:57Sugar, in general, the ingredients are a bit cheaper than they are to make chocolate, and therefore there's more opportunity to make good margins, good profits on sugar products.
13:07They just needed the right product to tempt us, and so they turned to a unique, soft American confectionery.
13:15Sugar up till then had been largely about solid boiled sugar products, and Mars had this new sort of cloudy and opaque, soft and chewy recipe, very unlike anything else in the market.
13:26Mars were experimenting with taffy. It's a bit like toffee, but less likely to lose you a tooth.
13:34They cooked up big vats of glucose, sugar and palm oil, allowing it to lightly set before adding juicy fruit flavours and citric acid for a mouth-watering hit.
13:45We had these really zingy strawberry, lemon, lime flavours, which at the time I think seemed much more modern to people.
13:53Next, they pulled out the mixture on machines, aerating it to create a smooth, chewy texture.
14:01It was very different, and it was a lot easier to eat. It produced this sort of mouth-watering effect, and that was completely new news in that market.
14:09Launched to the sound of an unforgettable jingle, the fruit taffy would come to be called opalfruits, and it would refresh a stale British market.
14:17Opalfruits, they're so fruity, they make your mouth-water.
14:22Opalfruits, paid to make your mouth-water.
14:24The opalfruits tagline was describing the one thing that made opalfruits really different.
14:31At a high citric acid content, that by definition makes your mouth-water.
14:36Mmm.
14:38Which gives you the sense of refreshment, and opalfruits did exactly what it said on the tin.
14:43But you can see they're made to make your mouth-water, because you can't talk once you reach them.
14:47Because it's like your mouth is filling up with fruit chips, really, which is what makes them so lovely.
14:52Throughout the 1960s, opalfruits went head-to-head with the likes of Bassett's and Roundtree's munching away at their profits.
15:02Mars were the new kids on the block, and the zingy flavours were new to the marketplace.
15:07But arguably, Roundtree's products were technically somewhat more difficult to make.
15:13We didn't see opalfruits competing directly.
15:17But the battle lines had been drawn.
15:21This was open warfare, and the fight soon spilled out of the factories and onto the high streets.
15:27Mars' approach, I think, was different partly because of the style of the products that were made.
15:32But also, we sold them in a very different way.
15:35For outdated British brands, things were about to get worse.
15:40In the 1980s, the way customers started buying sweets also changed.
15:46The news agent became the dominant sweetie retailer, promoting impulse buying that was perfect for sweets, as customers added little delicious extras to their bags as they went to pay.
15:57The real heart of the business was in those little confection shops, which sold newspapers and cigarettes and stuff, of course, at the time.
16:04So the product needed to be where it was tempting for people to buy, where it was no more than a slight stretch to pick it off the shelf.
16:11In this market, Mars were the first to realise that if you wanted a buyer's attention, where you put your product really mattered.
16:19Mars really concentrated on having a small number of products that sold really fast.
16:25So if we put our big sellers in the best display spaces, we would get the best return for our business.
16:30Dishing out financial incentives, Mars convinced shopkeepers to put their leading products together in what they called the hotspot.
16:39The hallowed space nearest to the till.
16:42They called their strategy block merchandising.
16:46At the time, it was absolutely a cool part of how we got the edge in the market.
16:51Mars competitors were literally edged out of the prime shelf space and saw sales plummet.
16:57On the face of it, selling sweets is a sort of a friendly, cosy business.
17:04But in practice, it was a war.
17:08And it was primarily a war for space.
17:11Ed Christie joined Roundtree's in the 1980s as a sales rep and was told to begin the fight back against Mars.
17:20So there's a lot of research that's gone into what are the best positions in any confectionary display.
17:25The hotspot is here.
17:27It's obviously near the till.
17:29Clearly, the coldest spot is this top right hand corner.
17:34And the difference in sales between a product sold in this hotspot and in the cold spot would be in the order of one and a half to two times.
17:43The natural best sellers should go in the hotspot, but Mars would offer the retailer £50 or whatever the incentive was to put all their products in a block.
17:54So they would take advantage of the best positions, regardless of how well they naturally sold.
17:59Roundtrees knew they needed a bigger strategy to respond to this new threat or risk losing their position in the market.
18:06They had very good merchandising operations. In truth, we could see they were getting ahead of us.
18:13We needed a new initiative that would actually get us better positions in the marketplace.
18:18Roundtrees thought they'd found their answer with some cunning high-tech market analysis.
18:24They spent tens of thousands developing it, and if it worked, it would seriously sour the pitch for Mars.
18:31What we wanted was something that was different and something that would benefit the retailer.
18:35So that they would actually want to break up the block, and that's how Merchandising by Merit started to develop.
18:45Hello. It's a well-known fact that in Great Britain, more confectionery is consumed per head than in almost any other country in the world.
18:54My goodness, it all looks terribly familiar, but it looks slightly dated.
18:59I think that shows how techniques have changed.
19:01The company even produced a no-expense-spared video to rubbish Mars' selling tactic and promote a radically different way of looking at things.
19:11Roundtree Macintosh weren't convinced that manufacturer block merchandising was the best way to market confectionery.
19:16They believe that this system undermines the trade as a whole, and you the retailer.
19:23Merchandising by Merit was the first time we took videos to the retailer to show them how it could be done, and how he could improve his profits, and we just happened to do better as well.
19:33Roundtree's wanted to show shopkeepers that breaking up Mars' block and putting all the top-selling brands in the hot spots would make everyone's sweeter profits.
19:45It was actually surprisingly slick, considering it's so old. I also remember the first time I saw this was in the Merchandising by Merit suite in York, and they projected it on the biggest telly I'd ever seen in my whole life.
19:59That was the essence of the Merchandising by Merit logic. The Merit being a good-selling product should go in a good position, regardless of who actually happens to make it.
20:12It's a really clear, quite clever, logical sales pitch.
20:18Well, there you have it.
20:19When Roundtree's bought in Merchandising by Merit, they were very much trying to mimic what Mars had been doing, because, in truth, it was working for Mars, but was very, very successful for them.
20:30If I look at stores today, so this is 30 years on from when these shelf wars were playing out, I think what Roundtree's has successfully done is disrupted the block merchandising approach.
20:40It's very rare when you see all the Mars products and all the Roundtree's products merchandised in blocks.
20:46So, I'm going to buy a packet of fruit pestles today, seeing as they're in the hot spot.
20:51Thank you very much.
20:52Cheers. Bye.
20:54Roundtree's had foiled Mars' attempt to dominate the sweetie shelves, and had maintained their spot at the top of the leaderboard of Britain's most loved sweets.
21:04They celebrated with a quirky fun campaign, highlighting the irresistible fruitiness of the product.
21:09You can't put a fruit pestle in your mouth without chewing it.
21:12Got a chew, got a chew, got a chew, the only thing you can do were the Roundtree's fruit pestles chew.
21:19But a new shadow would soon linger over the sweet maker's world, and it was huge.
21:24Bassett Foods, who make licorice all sorts, have welcomed the £91 million takeover bid from Cadbury Schweppes.
21:31If the offer is accepted, it will give Cadbury the largest share in the chocolate and sweets market in this country.
21:37In 1989, Cadbury, the UK's biggest chocolate maker, decided it wanted in on sweets, and it went big.
21:47Within two years, it had snapped up Trebor, Maynard's and Bassett's to create the ultimate sugar titan.
21:54The creation of Trebor Bassett was a game changer for the sugar confectionery industry.
21:59Almost overnight, Cadbury had added more than six major brands to its empire,
22:04with a mammoth range of sweeties, from jelly babies to wine gums and even extra strong mints.
22:11And they had big plans to take on the market.
22:14So, we focused on four or five different products under each of those brands.
22:19We called them pillar brands.
22:21Alan Palmer was given the job of promoting the sweet juggernaut.
22:25The expectations were very high.
22:29And so, really all of the time, we were focusing on growing our business and profitability.
22:35To promote this huge range of different brands, Alan knew exactly who to turn to.
22:40Marketing expert Jasbel Chadder.
22:43If you want to see the UK battleground for sweets, it's here.
22:49As the battleground expanded with major retailers,
22:52his approach to boosting the company's profits would revolutionise the industry
22:56and transform the way we eat sweets.
22:59I remember Alan Palmer saying to me,
23:02Time waits for no man or woman. You have to get this done.
23:05It's the early 1990s and Jasbel Chadder has embarked on a mission to boost sales for new mega-confectioner,
23:20Trebor Bassett.
23:21To tempt customers to spend big on treats, Jasbel developed an unprecedented range of bagged sweets,
23:28and in the process created a new snacking culture.
23:31No one took this as a project, as a, what I call, a transformational event in packaging.
23:41There's huge trends towards people travelling more.
23:44You know, people are watching movies more. There's lots more those kind of occasions.
23:49What we were trying to do was create moments of joy.
23:55So every bag had its own sensation.
23:59And so you created effectively this family occasion where you're munching through different sweets.
24:07Jasbel designed a range of bags for 60 of the new company's most popular sweets.
24:12Right. So this is the bag revolution on a page.
24:19This one page captures all the tears and perspiration of launching 60-odd products in eight months.
24:31The retail trade moved into convenience stores, to garages, to supermarkets,
24:36and packaging for the confectionery industry had to follow that convenience requirement.
24:43Ultimately, my aim was to create this kind of moorishness.
24:47You can't stop because you need another one.
24:50Even in the packaging, I was loath to have resealable packaging.
24:56Because I wanted them to eat the whole pack.
24:59Don't save it for next time. Eat it now.
25:02In the summer of 1991, Treebor Bassett's bagged sweets flooded onto the market,
25:10from supermarkets to corner shops to petrol stations.
25:14These shareable sensations were backed by countless humorous ad campaigns.
25:19Wine gums got the pure bonkers treatment.
25:22Maynard's original wine gums are filled with delicious juicy flavour just waiting to be set loose.
25:27All you've got to do is chew!
25:29So we created advertising.
25:32It's all about joyful, fun, play value. The childhood in you.
25:37Hootsman, there's juice. Liss, honey, there's his.
25:41The ads for all sorts played on the idea of customers being unable to resist their seductive sweet charms.
25:48We've gone too far this time.
25:50Want too many and you might turn 30.
25:52Capturing that emotion in brilliant advertising will get you success, no question.
26:00All your favourite Bassett sweets in one bag.
26:03But watch out for the all sorts.
26:05The new bags flew off the shelves, giving Cadbury's Treebor Bassett a 25% share of the market.
26:10Roundtree's were stunned by this new arrival, whose ads captured carefree childhood joy.
26:17As the market moved that way, it was not really good for Roundtree's at the time.
26:20We didn't have products that were ideal to move into bags.
26:23Roundtree's by far were our biggest competitor.
26:25But what they didn't have was the kind of diversity of products we had.
26:31When we first put fruit pastels into bags, the tests that we did showed that we were getting a lot of bits of pastels, the sugar, rubbing off each other and falling into the bottom of the bag.
26:43So you ended up with slightly bald fruit pastels, which is not ideal in the product that we wanted to get to the consumer.
26:50Roundtree's response was immediate.
26:52But I think they could never compete.
26:56So, no, it was good to see Roundtree suffer for once.
27:01Can I say that?
27:05Cadbury were delighted.
27:07Between Treebor Bassett and Maynard, they were selling more sweets than ever.
27:11The half-pound bag range grew to something like 20% of our total business from virtually nothing in a space of three years.
27:19But it wasn't long before the surging popularity of Britain's bagged sweets was noticed by a sweetie giant.
27:29As the 90s rolled on, this master of confection from Germany made a bold play for British customers.
27:35It was difficult to know whether it was going to stay or whether it would have gone. As it turned out, it's become a massive brand.
27:44I got a colour bottle, haven't I?
27:48At Haribo, we focus really heavily on a really great tasting product with a really great texture.
27:57But more than that, Haribo's about the childlike happiness and the fun and the smile that we can put on people's faces.
28:02And I think that was the gap that we saw in the market that we could bring to consumers in the UK.
28:11Haribo had in fact taken its first steps into the UK market during the 70s with an investment in a sweet maker called Dunhills.
28:18This traditional producer, known for the licorice pontefract cake, eventually gave Haribo a base from which to dazzle British taste buds with their gummy sweets.
28:31Haribo, from its conception over a hundred years ago, was making Haribo gold bears.
28:35So it had a long established recipe and a history of making great quality fruit gums, which when Haribo bought into the UK, brought those products across for the UK consumer to try.
28:48Haribo took full ownership of Dunhills in 1994 and started producing their famous melt in the mouth gummies on site.
28:56These squidgy delights were softer than anything else the market could offer.
29:00And they were crafted using unique recipes to create colourful fruity gums and meringue-like foam.
29:09They could even combine the textures to make creative gummy mashups.
29:14And they were as cheap as penny sweets from the pick and mix.
29:18When Haribo looked at the UK market, everyone was fixated by brown trees, Cadbury and then Mars.
29:25So effectively, it was a three horse race.
29:29And I think the complacency set in.
29:32Then, in 1995, Haribo changed the face of sweets with a blend of gummies tailored to the British market.
29:41StarMix came about because we had a really successful product range in what we call Countline or, you know, 1P, 2P, 5P sweets.
29:53And we had an idea of how we could take the most popular of those sweets and mix them in a bag format that we could then sell through the supermarkets.
30:03And that's why StarMix is called StarMix. It's because it's the mix of the star products, the best sellers.
30:08So it's our gold bear, our dummies, our fried eggs, our rings, our heartthrobs and our cola bottles.
30:14Combining the best of their gummy penny sweets in a popular bag, Haribo had created a phenomenon.
30:23Backed by an equally inventive ad campaign that played to pure childish fun,
30:28it sent shockwaves through the formerly cosy British market.
30:32No one was prepared.
30:34I remember Haribo coming onto the market very well.
30:39In those days, I was working in our European operations and we'd seen them working in Germany and France.
30:44So we were quite bothered about them.
30:48Let's open this, shall we?
30:54They are brilliant at textures.
30:56Just the right amount of chew.
30:59You don't want to be forever fighting and you run out of stamina.
31:03Right?
31:05You don't want to be, oh my God, that was a tough eat.
31:08You want to make it quick and juicy.
31:12Haribo have completely nailed it.
31:13I just don't think it's particularly good if I'm absolutely honest with you.
31:23It lacks sophistication in its taste.
31:27It's quite bland and the chewiness, which can be seen as a virtue, is not particularly to my taste.
31:34I don't think I'd have launched this.
31:37The gummy titan quickly built on the success of Starmix, expanding the range with more fun treats.
31:46Before long, they were dominating the UK competition.
31:49Firms like Roundtree's needed to find a way to rise to the challenge and fast.
31:55This is my kitchen equivalent of the sweet shop.
32:00Sweet shop.
32:02So I have my sweets in here.
32:06Lot of Roundtree products in there.
32:09So Black Crump Hassel, that's my favourite.
32:12Sue Hawksworth spent five years heading up Roundtree's sugar brands and was their secret weapon in their bid to take on Haribo.
32:21Absolutely gorgeous.
32:25Haribo blindsided us in a way.
32:28They effectively took the joy and pleasure of pick and mix and put it all together in one bag.
32:36So what could we do to counter that?
32:39Sue led a team of sweet moffins that had one mission,
32:43to uncover the secret of Haribo's gummy sensations and create a sugary super sweet to fight back.
32:50With Roundtree's, the whole benefit and premise of that brand was the real fruity flavours that we delivered.
32:57And we delivered through using real fruit juice.
33:00So at first, we thought, well, on a straight eat for eat basis, our products stood the test.
33:08So we created Roundtree's food pastel body parts.
33:12After months of painstaking work, Roundtree's unleashed their major innovation with a unique playful advert.
33:18But while these shapely fruit pastilles were popular, they weren't up to taking on the might of Haribo.
33:25If I'm honest, the actual delivery of the shapes themselves weren't anything like the quality that you could get with Haribo.
33:33And that was because a pastille didn't lend itself to being moulded and formed that way.
33:37Body parts led Roundtree's to a key realisation.
33:42We had to look beyond pastels. We had to look at the soft gummy or even the foam marketplace in order to create that distinct shape.
33:51Before they could perfect their own gummy, Roundtree's had to reconsider the basics of how and even where their sweets were made.
34:00A soft gummy is made in a different way to a fruit pastel.
34:05Typically, those products have very rapid mould changes because they're making sweets in different shapes.
34:11Roundtree's didn't have that expertise in the UK, but one of their factories in Eastern Europe did.
34:18If you have got a manufacturing plant that can change moulds, change the kind of sweets that are going down, then the world's your oyster.
34:27I mean, you can make any shape and those shapes could be as random as you wanted them to be.
34:35Roundtree's thought they were finally onto something with a sweet that came in a variety of textures, flavours and over 100 different shapes.
34:44They christened it randoms.
34:46We managed to tap into that excitement of creating pick and mix.
34:50You didn't know what kind of shape was going to come out or texture, but it had those wonderful fruity Roundtree's flavours.
35:00And they were in sharp contrast to the rather non-distinct flavours that were in a Haribo bag.
35:11I've got a packet of Roundtree's randoms here.
35:13Yeah, flavour's good.
35:20I think the flavour came out of them better than the Fruit Pastel actually, but that's an opinion.
35:26The Fruit Pastel is less elastic and the texture tends to break when you chew it in a different way.
35:37Now this is quite a different mouthfeel. It's rubbery. It breaks up more easily in the mouth.
35:44And when you squeeze it, it comes back again.
35:47And that's a typical gelatin product. It gives you an elastic sweet.
35:52Haribo have their own recipes. Their jelly sweets have got more gelatin in there, more rubbery.
35:58But that's the way they like them.
36:02Roundtree's blasted their new hope onto the market with a decidedly random campaign.
36:07It saw those who ate the sweets speaking in randoms.
36:10What the crocodile hat? What's that?
36:14Every time their fruity acorn gets that alarm clock, I want you to snowflake their teapot.
36:21Billions of random combinations in every bag.
36:25Let your random side out with new Roundtree's randoms.
36:28Having managed to come up with a distinctive fruity gummy of their own, could Roundtree's match Haribo's success?
36:34I don't think other products are Haribo-esque.
36:38I'm not sure if their product development is influenced by us or not.
36:42They certainly launched some mixed products and they launched some softer textured products into the market,
36:48which were quite different to other products that they'd launched before.
36:52But Roundtree's is a different brand to Haribo. It's offering a slightly different proposition.
36:55I think Haribo did take notice of what we'd done with Roundtree's randoms.
37:00It's interesting to note now that on their star mix they declare that they now contain real fruit juices in their sweets,
37:08which were, I think, their Achilles heel versus something like Roundtree's.
37:13Roundtree's had found their feet once again, but Haribo was about to unleash one of the biggest weapons in their arsenal.
37:21By the late noughties, Roundtree's had begun the fight back against Haribo's market domination.
37:36But the star mix creators would manage to stay on top using a very different type of advert.
37:42Haribo is all about kids and grown-ups loving our products. That's our slogan.
37:48And we were looking for a new way to convey that message.
37:53I can't be serious now.
37:57Alison Satterthwaite has been part of the team responsible for Haribo's advertising for 10 years.
38:02We wanted to find a new and distinct way we could really communicate the childlike happiness that the brand offers.
38:10And what better way to do that than through the voices of kids.
38:14I just want to talk about this Haribo star mix sweeties.
38:18I like the hearts.
38:19As soon as we had the idea of using kids' voices, we could have gone down a process which was write a script, imagine you're a child, what would a child say?
38:30But what I think people don't know or they don't recognise is that the dialogue of our adverts is completely based on unscripted conversation of kids.
38:39We got children round a table, opened up a bag of star mix and asked them what their favourite sweet was and why. And that's where the magic happens.
38:49Look, you have made a big, big sandwich.
38:54That's really what Haribo's about.
38:57Psst, hey guys, who loves Haribo Goldbeard?
39:01It was such a hit that kids' voices spread across the world.
39:04It's been phenomenally successful for us. The campaign has now reached as far afield as the United States and most recently into Japan.
39:13Look! Haribo Goldbeard!
39:15Aolingo more.
39:17Oh, lots of million!
39:19You had to be impressed by what they did. They managed to capture both kids and grown-ups and tap into that nostalgic feel.
39:28They brought out the kid in every adult and that's been the premise of their advertising.
39:33now for decades and they did very well with it.
39:37With the award-winning global success of their advertising and unstoppable gummies, Haribo today turns over more than £180 million a year in the UK alone and has five of the top ten selling sweets in the country.
39:52Did I think Haribo would become as big as they've become? No, I don't think I did.
39:57Their operations were done well and there was some arrogance. When we looked at competitors coming in that we didn't think were quite as good, I think Haribo probably proved us that we shouldn't have been quite self-confident.
40:09We're much more open to new sensations. So, yes, disruptors are here to say and they're going to keep coming.
40:19At this factory up in Leicester, a new brand is taking a very different approach to sweet making. As young consumers care more and more about what goes into food, Candy Kittens burst onto the market in 2012 with a key difference, making sweets with a social conscience.
40:38The company was created by TV personality Jamie Lang and designer Ed Williams.
40:45When we first started, the whole category was archaic. You know, nothing had changed. We were still eating like cola bottles and gummy bears and there was just nothing new and exciting.
40:55There was this huge gap in the confectionary shelf for a brand that was really speaking to consumers of our age, people that were young, interested in the products that they were eating and what went into those products and it just felt like it was prime time for someone to come along and challenge that.
41:11For more than a hundred years, gelatin, an animal by-product from pork or beef had been used to give gummy sweets their distinctive texture.
41:21Aware of their target consumers ethics, Candy Kittens decided to remove it.
41:27There's definitely a move towards vegan sweets. I remember when I was looking after the brands in the 1990s, that was something that continuously came up.
41:36But removing gelatin out of some sweets can fundamentally change the texture. So it's not an easy ask and for people that is a barrier.
41:48When we first started, people thought we were crazy. We would often get people at big established confectionary companies telling us that natural ingredients are not important, that vegan is just a fad.
41:59Candy Kittens spent 18 months formulating the perfect recipe that could still feel squidgy and chewy in the mouth.
42:06We wanted to make it then gluten free because we thought that would make a better sweet.
42:10But also we wanted to have real fruit juice in it in terms of blueberry juice or watermelon juice.
42:15So we wanted to make the best sweet possible and it was always about changing that 1%.
42:19How can we get 1% better, 1% better, 1% better.
42:23In the world of sweets, they were playing a risky game.
42:27Launching new products in the UK is incredibly difficult. The vast majority fail within the first three years.
42:33And if we look back at products that were launched back in the late 90s or even in the 2010s, very few of those products you'll find on the shelves today.
42:42So it's an incredibly hard thing to get right.
42:44We definitely had all of our eggs in one basket and I think if it hadn't have worked, then perhaps we would have had to get ourselves down the job centre and start again.
42:54With their innovative ethical approach, Candy Kittens had lofty ambitions to take on the giants from the very start.
43:01So I think one thing that Haribo do quite well is the variety of sweets in the bag.
43:06So all the different shapes are something that kind of keeps you interested and makes you rummage through.
43:10But actually because the sweets have all been mixed together, you then don't get any individual flavours.
43:15So you struggle to tell me that that's a strawberry or that's a cola, they all just taste sweet.
43:20And one of the things we've been passionate about at Candy Kittens since day one is making single flavour bags.
43:26Then you really know if you're eating a strawberry or a cherry.
43:30We made premium gourmet candy.
43:32That wasn't even a word until we came into the market. We invented that. We made candy premium.
43:39But charging one of the highest prices in the industry three pounds a bag, do their own flavours cut it?
43:46It's very different to what we do. Quite a firm texture.
43:51But it certainly delivers on the very cherry branding.
43:55Do you think it's a little too expensive?
43:58I think that's for the consumer to decide.
44:00Certainly it is more expensive. It's nearly twice the price of Haribo.
44:03But ultimately consumers will decide where they want to spend their money on.
44:07Gelatin tends to make a product last longer in your mouth.
44:12And given that this hasn't got that as an ingredient, they've done very well to give it that longevity of eat.
44:19But sweets are bought for fun and enjoyment.
44:23They're cheap and cheerful and that's what they ought to be.
44:27So whilst it might be a nice sweet, twice the price?
44:32Don't think so.
44:34However, Candy Kittens' business is steadily growing and they believe their influence is too.
44:40We did a slight update onto StarMix last year.
44:46We made a slight tweak to the recipe, included more fruit juice,
44:49and we've brought new vegetarian products to market over the last two or three years
44:53as we see that popular trend continuing.
44:57I think Haribo now have taken notice of this.
45:00To be a leader in sugar and confectionery, I think you have to be different.
45:04But it's more than that now.
45:05It's not just about what the product is, it's more about what you represent as a whole.
45:11New companies and brands will continue to disrupt the sweet market and drive innovation.
45:17We have a thirst for new products.
45:22I think we are desperate now as a population looking for fresh ideas.
45:27and hoping those will become tomorrow's branchless fruit pastels.
45:34And the old guard of classic sweets isn't afraid to move with the times either.
45:39They're part of our culture, they're part of our heritage, a brand like fruit pastel.
45:44They have stood the test of time.
45:46They have now moved to vegan.
45:50The whole market has moved.
45:52And at the end of the day, they're a damn good product.
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