There’s a very specific flavour of grief reserved for snacks. Not the loud, public sort, but the quiet kind that ambushes you in a corner shop four decades after the fact. Your hand drifts towards the confectionery shelf for something it remembers, something that left the building before your voice broke, and the hand comes back empty. The sweet has gone. It left quietly and nobody held a service.
I grew up on a council estate in Farnham in the seventies and eighties, where pocket money stretched to roughly one good decision a week. The local newsagent functioned as a sort of edible museum, and I treated the choice with the seriousness most people reserve for buying a house. So when these things vanished, I noticed. I’m still noticing now, which probably tells you more about me than the subject of this post.
Spangles: the sweet that simply stopped turning up
Mars made Spangles from 1950 right through to the early eighties, a fruit-flavoured boiled sweet shaped like a little rounded square with a dimple pressed into each face. They came in a striped paper tube, and the early advertising had an American cowboy actor calling them “Hoppy’s favourite sweet”, which, looking back, feels like an enormous amount of marketing muscle aimed at a sweet you could buy for loose change.
The version that lodged in my memory had the grandest name in all of confectionery: Old English Spangles. Liquorice, mint humbug, pear drop, aniseed and treacle, presented in black and purple packaging clearly designed for a more distinguished clientele than the average eight-year-old in a hand-me-down anorak. You felt sophisticated eating one. You felt like the sort of person who owned a cravat.
Mars discontinued them in 1984. There came a brief, teasing reappearance in 1995, mostly in Woolworths, with only four varieties allowed back through the door. Then they vanished again. In 2008 they topped a national poll of discontinued brands the British public most wanted resurrected, which is the confectionery equivalent of being voted Most Missed at a school reunion you weren’t invited to.
Pacers: an identity crisis in mint form
Pacers began life as Opal Mints, the minty sibling of Opal Fruits. Then, around 1976, Mars relaunched the whole operation as Pacers, painted three green peppermint stripes down each sweet, and pivoted the entire brand towards sport and fitness. The slogan promised “Peppermint striped for two-mint freshness”, a phrase I’ve carried in my head for forty years and have never felt the need to share until now.
The adverts featured people in green-and-white striped kit being relentlessly active; the implication being that a chewy mint might somehow turn you into an athlete. It did not. It did, though, hand Glasgow Celtic an unexpected nickname; for a while the team found themselves called “The Pacers”, purely because their kit resembled the sweet. Imagine training for a cup final and discovering your entire club has been named after a discontinued mint. There’s a humility in that.
Mars pulled Pacers in 1985, and an entire generation quietly lost the only mint that ever encouraged them to do a warm-up.
The Texan bar: it sure is a mighty chew
Rowntree Mackintosh launched the Texan in the early seventies: a slab of chewy nougat and toffee under a milk-chocolate coat, sold on a cowboy theme and the immortal slogan “Sure is a mighty chew.” And mighty it proved. The thing required genuine commitment. You didn’t so much eat a Texan as enter into a long-term relationship with it, jaw aching, fillings under review, the afternoon disappearing into a single bar.
Production stopped in 1984. The story doesn’t quite end there, mind you. In a 2004 survey, the Texan landed near the top of the nation’s most-missed sweets, and Nestlé brought it back the following year as a limited-edition nostalgia run. Limited being the operative word. It tipped its hat, took our money, and rode off into the sunset all over again.
The crisps that drifted out the back door
Sweets hog all the eulogies, but the crisp aisle lost good soldiers too. KP gave us Outer Spacers during the great space craze of the eighties: little flying-saucer-shaped corn snacks in flavours including pickled onion and mango chutney. Mango chutney. In a crisp aimed at primary-school children. Somebody sat in a meeting, pitched “saucer-shaped snack, chutney flavour, for the under-tens”, and somebody else said yes. KP later recoloured and rechristened them Alien Spacers, because the eighties never met a concept it couldn’t push one notch further.
Then there’s Tudor, a proper regional institution born in Sunderland back in 1947 and beloved across the North East. Tudor backed the brave flavours long before the rest of the country caught up: Tomato Ketchup, Hot Dog and Mustard, Pickled Onion. After PepsiCo bought Smith’s in 1989 and threw its weight behind Walkers, Tudor’s days shortened. The brand quietly disappeared in 2003, taking a small piece of the North East’s heart with it.
Why we mourn a boiled sweet
It would be easy to call all this trivial, and on paper it is. Nobody’s life genuinely worsened because a mint stopped striping itself for two-mint freshness. But that’s not really what the grief is about, is it? A Texan bar wasn’t just a Texan bar. It tasted of a particular Saturday, a particular walk back from a particular shop, a version of you that had no mortgage and no opinions about boiler service plans. The snack vanished, and so did the boy holding it.
That’s the cruel trick of nostalgia. You think you miss the food. You actually miss the afternoon. And nobody can reissue an afternoon, however many limited-edition runs they attempt.
So we petition. We sign things. Grown adults with pensions and Facebook accounts campaign for the return of a chutney-flavoured saucer, not because we’d really eat them now, but because their absence is a small proof that time only travels one way. We’d quite like a quiet word with whoever’s in charge of that.
If you want the whole decade back, not just the sweets
This, as it happens, is the exact ache I keep writing about. My very first novel, The ’86 Fix, drops a fed-up fortysomething back into 1986 through nothing more magical than a can of Coke from the local newsagent, into a world of Space Invaders, Texan bars and decisions he’d give anything to make differently. It’s about exactly this feeling, the snack-aisle pang made life-sized.
And if you prefer your time travel with a heavier conscience, A Page in Your Diary sends a middle-aged man back to the late eighties to undo the damage he caused a girl he once loved, in a Britain still thick with the things we’ve since lost. Both are about the same truth this whole post keeps circling: you can’t buy the old sweets back, but for a few hundred pages you can taste the era they belonged to.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Mars stop making Spangles?
Mars discontinued Spangles in 1984, after producing them since 1950. They returned briefly in 1995, sold mostly through Woolworths with just four varieties, before disappearing once more. In 2008 they topped a poll of discontinued brands the British public most wanted brought back.
What were Pacers and why did they stop making them?
Pacers began as Opal Mints and relaunched under the Pacers name around 1976, gaining three green peppermint stripes and a sporty advertising theme built on the slogan “Peppermint striped for two-mint freshness.” Mars discontinued the brand in 1985.
Is the Texan bar still available?
No. Rowntree Mackintosh stopped producing the Texan bar in 1984. After it ranked highly in a 2004 survey of most-missed sweets, Nestlé brought it back in 2005 as a limited-edition nostalgia release, but it didn’t return permanently.
What were Outer Spacers crisps?
Outer Spacers were flying-saucer-shaped corn snacks made by KP during the eighties space craze, sold in flavours including pickled onion and mango chutney. KP later recoloured and renamed them Alien Spacers.
Why did Tudor crisps disappear?
Tudor, a North East crisp brand founded in Sunderland in 1947, built its name on adventurous flavours like Hot Dog and Mustard. After PepsiCo bought Smith’s in 1989 and focused on Walkers, the Tudor brand faded away, ending in 2003.