How are pear drops made?

Pear drops are drop sweets: boiled, coloured and flavoured on a slab, then squeezed between engraved rollers into little pear shaped drops. Here is the method, as a maker of the machines describes it, and where the smell comes from.

How it is made 2 minute read Updated 26 September 2026 5 sources

In this article

How drops are made
The flavour
Boiled sweet basics
A British favourite

Pear Drops. Hard boiled pear drops, the traditional rounded drop shape with a slight point, half pink and half yellow, glassy and translucent, lightly dusted with fine sugar. — Pear Drops in our pick and mix, £1.29 per 100 g. See them in the shop, with every ingredient and allergen. The picture is an illustration.

A pear drop is a British boiled sweet made from sugar and flavourings. The old fashioned kind is a pear shaped drop about the size of a thumbnail, half pink and half yellow, although most packets now hold separate pink drops and yellow drops in roughly equal numbers: see pear drops

How drops are made

Pear drops belong to the family of drop sweets, made on a machine called a drop roller. The British machinery maker Loynds, which builds drop rollers, sets out the method:

Boil. White sugar is dissolved in water and boiled, then liquid glucose is stirred in, at about 60 parts sugar to 40 parts glucose. The batch is heated to 146°C.
Pour. The hot batch is poured onto a lightly oiled cold surface.
Colour and flavour. Liquid colours and flavours are added, often measured with syringes, and folded in like kneading dough.
Add acid. For fruit flavours, powdered citric acid is sprinkled over the batch and worked in.
Roll. The batch is fed as a sheet into the drop roller. Its interchangeable brass rollers are engraved with shapes, including pears, lemons, ovals, balls and flat drops, and they press the sheet into rows of sweets.
Break up. Once the sheet has cooled, it is broken up with a flat scraper into individual sweets.

A motorised drop roller can make up to 125 kg of sweets an hour, and a hand turned one up to 25 kg. Drop rollers can make single colour sweets and two colour layered ones, like the half pink, half yellow pear drop. For other drop sweets, see how are fruit drops made? and acid drops

The flavour

The pear drop's flavour comes from two esters, compounds that smell strongly of fruit. Isoamyl acetate gives a banana flavour, and ethyl acetate a pear flavour. Both are used in many pear and banana flavoured sweets, and some makers use a natural pear flavour made from pear juice concentrate instead. Ethyl acetate is also a solvent in some nail varnish removers, which is why pear drops can smell a little like them: see why do pear drops smell like nail varnish?

Boiled sweet basics

Like other boiled sweets, a pear drop is cooked until almost all the water has gone, so it sets hard and glassy. The glucose syrup helps stop the sugar crystallising as it cools: see how are boiled sweets made?

A British favourite

In a 2009 survey of 4,000 adults, pear drops came fourteenth among the UK's most popular sweets. The largest pear drop in the world is on show at Stockley's Sweets in Oswaldtwistle Mills, Lancashire. Our Pear Drops card opens up to show the full ingredients and allergen information.