Image: Good to Know

Faizel Patel – 08/12/2020

(Twitter: @FaizelPatel143)

We all have our favourite Quality Street sweets, what is yours?

A journalist at Business Insider South Africa audited’ 5 kilograms of Quality Streets, a popular confectionary brand in South Africa – especially towards the end of the year and the results were surprising.

Andrew Thompson was speaking to Radio Islam on Monday about Quality Street which has become synonymous among South Africans which has piqued there sweet tooth for generations with some even cherishing the nostalgic containers the sweets are packaged in as memento’s.

Quality Street, a brand founded in England in the 1930’s.

Thompson says the results of the Quality Street audit was surprising.

“There are people whose job it is to determine which variety of sweet goes into which sorted bag. The expert I spoke to on the topic who’s an industrial engineer told me that they consider various factors when they are making up the bag, there is a slightly random element to it. But the consistency of the sweet type to me shows it’s much more considered than we realise.”

So what is everyone’s favourite Quality Street sweet?

“Andecdotally the most popular one is that purple one with a bit of toffee and hazelnut in the middle. But I suppose the beauty of it is that everyone’s got their favourite and everyone’s got their worse. If you tend to be a family where you have a big bowl on a table, it’s quite interesting to look at which ones tend to sit right until the end and so you have no choice.”

Thompson says Nestle, who now manufactures Quality Street around the world, sold more than 300,000 kilograms of the assorted individually wrapped toffees and chocolates in the last quarter of 2020, in South Africa alone.

Listen to the interview with Andrew Thompson