How many calories are in pick and mix?

There is no single answer to how many calories are in pick and mix, because pick and mix can be almost anything. A scoop of boiled sweets, a scoop of jellies and a scoop of chocolate raisins will all be different. But the calories in sweets follow a simple pattern: sugar gives one level, and fat pushes it higher.

Sugar sweets

Fully refined sugar provides about 390 kilocalories per 100 g. Most boiled sweets are nearly 100 per cent sugar by weight, so they come in close to that figure. Sweets that contain water, such as jellies and gums, can be a little lower per 100 g, because some of their weight is water.

For a sense of scale, one published nutrition figure for a Barratt Fruit Salad chew gave about 10 kcal for a single 2.6 g chew. Small sweets add up quickly.

Chocolate sweets

Chocolate is higher, because it contains a lot of fat as well as sugar. Figures for milk chocolate range from about 540 to 565 kcal per 100 g, and milk chocolate is around 30 to 38 per cent fat. Dark chocolate is higher still, at about 600 kcal per 100 g. Chocolate coated sweets, such as chocolate raisins or chocolate toffees, sit somewhere between sugar sweets and plain chocolate, depending on how much chocolate they carry.

Sugar free sweets

Sugar free sweets are made with sugar alcohols, which are counted on labels at 2.4 kcal per gram, compared with about 3.9 for table sugar. So they are lower in calories than their sugary versions, but not calorie free: see what are sugar free sweets made with?

How that compares with daily needs

The NHS says an average man needs about 2,500 kcal a day and an average woman about 2,000 kcal. At about 390 kcal per 100 g, a 100 g bag of sugar sweets is roughly a fifth of an average woman's daily energy. Sugar is also limited separately: see how much sugar is in sweets?

Finding the real figure

The only exact figure for a particular sweet is the one in its nutrition information, which gives energy per 100 g, labelled as energy in kcal and kJ. Our pick and mix is sold by the 100 g, so it is easy to work out what you are buying: see why is pick and mix sold by weight?

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