{
    "id": 1070694,
    "title": "Is candy floss vegan?",
    "slug": "is-candy-floss-vegan",
    "type": "page",
    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/is-candy-floss-vegan/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T01:15:35+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Usually, yes. Candy floss is spun sugar with a little flavouring and colour. Check the colour, as carmine comes from insects, and where the sugar is from.",
    "content_text": "Candy floss is usually vegan. It is made almost entirely of sugar, spun into fine threads, with a little flavouring and, often, some food colouring. There are no eggs, milk or gelatine in the basic recipe. The only things to check are what the colour is made from and, if you want to be thorough, the sugar.\nWhat candy floss is made of\nCandy floss is spun sugar. A candy floss machine has a spinning head with a small bowl in the middle. Granulated sugar, often already coloured, or sugar with separate food colouring, is poured into the bowl. Heaters near the rim melt the sugar, and the spinning head squeezes it out through tiny holes, where it cools in an instant into threads as fine as cotton. Sugar made specially for the machines is milled so that it melts evenly.\nSo the ingredients are simple: sugar, a small amount of flavouring, and a colour.\nThe colour\nThe colour is the main thing to check. Pink and red candy floss can be coloured in several ways: with synthetic colours, with colours from plants such as black carrot, or with carmine, also called cochineal or E120, a red colour made from crushed insects. Carmine is not vegan, and many people who follow halal diets avoid it too: see what is carmine?\nWith packaged candy floss, check the ingredients. With candy floss spun at a fair or a party, ask the seller what colour and sugar they use.\nThe sugar\nSome vegans also ask how the sugar was refined, because in some countries cane sugar is filtered through bone char, made from charred animal bones. According to PETA, bone char is used to refine some cane sugar in the United States, but no major sugar company in the UK is known to use it. Sugar made from sugar beet does not involve bone char at all.\nA treat with a dental history\nCandy floss has an unlikely origin. Machine spun candy floss was invented in 1897 by a dentist, William Morrison, and a confectioner, John C. Wharton. They introduced it to a wide audience at the 1904 World's Fair in St Louis as Fairy Floss, and sold 68,655 boxes: see the dentist who invented candy floss\nIt is sold as candy floss in the UK, Ireland, India, New Zealand and South Africa, as cotton candy in America, and still as fairy floss in Australia.",
    "contentSignals": "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes",
    "links": {
        "apiCatalog": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/api-catalog",
        "llmsTxt": "https://sweeties.net/llms.txt",
        "mcpCard": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
        "primaryAgenticRouteAuthority": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/sweeties-primary-agentic-route-authority.json"
    }
}