This year sees an important milestone in the history of one of Britain’s best-loved sweets, Smarties. Andy Walker reflects on their colourful history

TRUE Smarties connoisseurs have their own individual childhood memories of the sweet – invented in the region – that marks its 75th anniversary this year.

For some, it was obsessively collecting the plastic stoppers, with lower-case letters stamped into them, from the tops of old-style tubes.

Those who were that way inclined might have tried to collect enough different letters to spell out whatever rude word they’d most recently learnt.

A shortage of key letters often put paid to such ambitions.

Others will recall playing Suck the Smartie at friends’ birthday parties – a game beloved by harassed parents, as it had the dual benefit of being both thrifty and a convenient way of briefly hushing a gaggle of manic, sugared-up youngsters.

Then there were those who emptied their tube of the candy-covered chocolates and arranged them by colour. Then ate them in colour groupings, to see if they tasted different.

Throwing a solitary Smartie up in the air and trying to catch it in your gob, that was another one. To be fair, though, that game works with an endless array of treats, sweet and otherwise.

Any of this sounding familiar? Personally, I delighted in spreading the wild break-time gossip surrounding blue Smarties. No doubt the rumours differed, but playground tale-tellers at my school had it that the blue ones were just red ones with an extra layer of food colouring.

And then, when you got older and overdid it on a night out, a scolding member of the older generation might sound a note of caution when it came to hangover tablets: “Don’t take too many of them, son,” they would wisely warn.

“They’re not Smarties, you know.”

Created in 1937 and produced at a factory in York for the best part of 70 years, more than 50 million tubes of Smarties are now sold in the UK each year.

To celebrate the anniversary, Nestlé, the Swiss-owned confectionery company behind the brand, re-packaged the sweets into a limited edition retro hexagonal tube.

A spokesman for the company, which also produces the ever-popular Kit Kat and Yorkie bars, said: “Smarties tubes have always been an iconic part of the brand’s heritage, so what better way to celebrate our 75th birthday than creating a limited edition tube?

“We hope to bring all the fun of Smarties to families for the next 75 years.”

Smarties come in eight colours – red, orange, blue, green, yellow, pink, violet and brown. The orange ones are flavoured with – and this fact is not lifted directly from the playground – a natural orange oil.

Take a look at the ingredients printed on the side of one of the new hexagonal tubes, and you’ll learn that today’s Smarties include a variety of fruit and vegetable concentrates, including radish, carrot, lemon and red cabbage.

Enough for one of your five portions of fruit and veg a day? Doubtful.

SMARTIES began life with the less zappy name Chocolate Beans. An inspired rethink by a marketing boffin of the day saw them re-branded as Smarties in 1937.

They continued to be produced in York, in their hundreds of millions, until production was moved to a factory in Germany, in 2007.

Susan Schofield, of Rawcliffe, near York, joined the Smarties plant in 1967, as a 15-yearold and worked at the site until the early 1980s. She remembers how the production of Smarties took up five entire floors of one block at the factory, in York’s Haxby Road.

“The chocolate drops were made upstairs, then went down and got their sugar coating and then they got coloured in huge metal vats,” she said. “When they had been coloured, they went on to the picking belts where you would take out the mis-shapen or chipped ones.”

Susan has happy memories from her days on the Smarties production line.

“There were a lot of individual jobs back then,” she said. “We used to shake the Smarties into the tubes by hand and put the tops on them. It was a good place to work. I finished my working life in 2004 in the Kit Kat plant.

When I look back, I had the best years in Smarties.”

The famous blue Smartie was first produced in 1988, originally as a limited edition addition.

Due to its popularity – doubtless all that playground patter worked wonders for sales – it soon became a permanent fixture in the Smarties palette. Fast forward to 2005 and Smarties became one of the first children’s confectionery brands to boast “no artificial colours”, in response to the growing trend of consumers being increasingly concerned about additives and artificial colourings in children’s foods.

So, it’s happy anniversary to one of our most beloved and most talked-about sweets. Here’s to the next 75 years and beyond.

Maybe the future will finally see solved the mystery that has been troubling Smarties fans for the best part of eight decades: if only Smarties have the answer, just what is the question?