What sweets were popular in the 1980s?

We have not found reliable sales figures ranking the sweets of the 1980s, so any top ten would be guesswork. What the records do show is which sweets arrived, which disappeared, and how a few of them sold. Here is the decade year by year.

New in the 1980s

• Drifter, 1980. Rowntree's launched Drifter, a wafer topped with caramel and covered in milk chocolate. It lasted, on and off, until 2018.
• Wispa, 1981. Cadbury's aerated chocolate bar was trialled in North East England in 1981 and, after its success there, launched nationally in 1983. It was seen as a rival to Rowntree's Aero, and was later dropped and brought back after a fan campaign: see the Wispa comeback
• Wham bars, early 1980s. Thin chew bars with coloured pieces of sherbet inside, made by McCowan's of Stenhousemuir in Scotland. At their peak, 30 million were sold a year: see Wham bars
• Cabana. A Rowntree's bar of coconut, caramel and cherries in milk chocolate, first made in the 1980s, with a television advert set to a version of the Banana Boat Song. It was discontinued in the early 1990s.
• Secret. Another Rowntree Mackintosh bar invented in the 1980s, with a nest of chocolate around a mousse centre. A well known advert for it launched in 1990.
• Boost, 1985. Boost was introduced in Britain as Coconut Boost, a coconut and caramel bar. In 1989 the peanut and caramel Starbar was rebranded as Peanut Boost.
• Ice Cream Chewits, 1989. A flavour of Chewits first released in 1989, which was brought back in 2009 after an online petition.

The big takeover

A big change happened in the boardroom. On 13 April 1988 the Swiss company Jacobs Suchard made a dawn raid on Rowntree's shares, and Nestlé stepped in as a white knight. Nestlé bought Rowntree's that year, when it was the fourth largest chocolate maker in the world, after Mars, Hershey and Cadbury. Kit Kat, Aero, Smarties, Rolo, Quality Street and Polo all became Nestlé brands, and the Rowntree name lives on today on jelly sweets such as Fruit Gums and Fruit Pastilles: see when Nestlé bought Rowntree

Gone in the 1980s

Several sweets ended in the 1980s. Spangles, Mars's square boiled sweets, ended in 1984 after more than 30 years, and so did the Texan bar. Pacers, the striped chewy mints, followed in 1985: see Pacers and the Texan bar

Marathon made it through the 1980s but not much further. The bar had been sold in Britain under that name since 1968, and in 1990 it became Snickers to match the rest of the world.

For the decades either side, see what sweets were popular in the 1970s? and what sweets were popular in the 1990s?

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