How much pick and mix do you need per person?

There is no official rule for how much pick and mix to buy per person, and the published guides give quite different answers. The right amount depends on how the sweets will be served. Here are the suggestions, and a simple way to work out your order.

What the guides say

• About 100 g per guest. The sweet wholesaler Wholesale Sweets suggests around 100 g of sweets per guest for a wedding, which works out at about 10 kg for 100 guests.
• 200 to 250 g per adult. The Added Extra, an event hire company that offers sweet carts, suggests 200 to 250 g of mixed sweets per adult guest, or 20 to 25 kg for 100 guests, and 50 to 75 g for each child.

Both come from businesses that sell sweets or hire out sweet carts, and neither is an official figure, so treat them as starting points rather than rules.

Doing the sums

Multiply the number of guests by the amount per head:

| Guests | At 100 g each | At 200 g each | At 250 g each | |---:|---:|---:|---:| | 25 | 2.5 kg | 5 kg | 6.25 kg | | 50 | 5 kg | 10 kg | 12.5 kg | | 100 | 10 kg | 20 kg | 25 kg | | 150 | 15 kg | 30 kg | 37.5 kg |

Pick and mix is sold by weight, which makes it easy to buy the total you need: see why is pick and mix sold by weight? We sell every sweet by the 100 g, so you can build any total in 100 g steps.

A word about sugar

Sweets are mostly sugar. Boiled sweets and rock are nearly 100 per cent sugar by weight, and jelly sweets are still mainly sugar. The NHS advises that adults have no more than 30 g of free sugars a day, children aged 7 to 10 no more than 24 g, and children aged 4 to 6 no more than 19 g. So 100 g of boiled sweets can contain close to 100 g of sugar, more than three times the adult maximum, which is worth remembering when the bags are handed out: see how much sugar is in sweets?

For comparison

Sweden has the highest sweet consumption in the world, and as of 2014 Swedes ate about 18 kg of sweets per person a year. That is roughly 350 g a week: see what is Swedish pick and mix?

For a wedding or party display, see what is a sweet cart?

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