{
    "id": 1070830,
    "title": "How are fruit pastilles made?",
    "slug": "how-are-fruit-pastilles-made",
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    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/how-are-fruit-pastilles-made/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T03:42:01+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Fruit pastilles are a thick, fruit flavoured syrup poured into moulds of powdered starch, left to set and dry, then coated in sugar. Today they are vegan.",
    "content_text": "A pastille is a sweet made from a thick liquid that has been set solid, meant to be chewed lightly and allowed to dissolve in the mouth. The word comes from the Latin pastillus, a small lump, and pastilles were used as a way of taking herbal remedies in the 18th century before they became sweets.\nHow pastilles are made\nCook the syrup. Sugar, glucose syrup and a setting agent such as starch are cooked into a thick liquid, and the flavours, acids and colours are mixed in.Pour into moulds. The liquid is poured into moulds made in powdered starch, sugar or wax.Set and dry. It is left to set and dry into firm pieces.Finish. The pastilles are cleaned of the powder and coated in sugar.\nPouring into powder moulds is the same starch moulding method used for jelly babies and wine gums: see what is starch moulding? Traditional medicinal pastilles were often based on starch and gum arabic, which bind oily flavourings, slow down how fast the pastille dissolves and make it sturdier.\nWhat is in a Rowntree's Fruit Pastille today\nNestlé lists the ingredients of its Fruit Pastilles as sugar, glucose syrup, starch, invert sugar syrup, four acids (malic, citric, lactic and acetic), concentrated fruit juice at 1.2 per cent, an acidity regulator, flavourings, and colours from fruit and vegetables: anthocyanins, copper complexes of chlorophyllins, beta carotene and curcumin. That was the list on its website in September 2026. Starch, not gelatine, now does the setting: see starch jelly sweets explained\nTaking the gelatine out\nFor many years Fruit Pastilles contained gelatine. In September 2020, after many requests from customers, Nestlé announced they would become suitable for vegans. Its technicians trialled more than 30 recipes to remove the gelatine while keeping the chew, and the new recipe reached sharing bags from October 2020: see a guide to vegan sweets\nFrom York to the world\nFruit Pastilles were first made in York in 1881 by the brothers Henry and Joseph Rowntree, working with the French confectioner August Claude Gaget, and by 1887 they made up about a quarter of the company's output by weight: see Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker chocolate maker. Production moved to a new factory at Fawdon, near Newcastle, in 1958; in 2020 Nestlé said the Fawdon site was making about 150 tonnes a week. In 2023, production moved to the Czech Republic.\nEach pastille is about 1.5 cm across and covered with sugar, and the five classic flavours are lemon, lime, strawberry, blackcurrant and orange. For their cousins, see how are wine gums made?",
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