What sweets were popular in the 1990s?

We have not found reliable sales figures ranking the sweets of the 1990s, so any top ten would be guesswork. The records do show which sweets arrived, which came back, which changed their names and which went, along with one launch sales figure. Here is the decade.

New in the 1990s

• Time Out, 1992. Cadbury's wafer bar, mainly sold in pairs, with milk chocolate between two wafers covered in Dairy Milk chocolate. The original was discontinued by 2016.
• Fuse, 1996. Cadbury launched Fuse, a bar of milk chocolate packed with sliced peanuts, raisins, crisp cereal and fudge pieces, nationally on Tuesday 24 September 1996, which it called FuseDay. Forty million Fuse bars were sold in the first week, and it was Cadbury's fastest selling new bar since Wispa in 1983. It was discontinued in 2006.
• Miniature Heroes, 1999. Cadbury's box of miniature bars, launched as a response to Mars's Celebrations.
• Fry's Spirit. An unsuccessful mid 1990s relaunch of the Fry's cream bars brought cocktail flavours, including Berry Margarita and Piña Colada.

Comebacks

• Freddo returned to the UK in 1994 after 15 years away, priced at 10p. It stayed at 10p until 2005.
• Spangles were briefly brought back in 1995, including in Woolworths shops, but only in four flavours: see Spangles

New names

Two long running British brands were renamed so that they would match the rest of the world. Marathon, sold in Britain since 1968, became Snickers in 1990: see when Marathon became Snickers Opal Fruits, launched by Mars in 1959, became Starburst in 1998, a move that a trade magazine later said was by no means universally popular: see Opal Fruits

Gone in the 1990s

• Cabana, Rowntree's coconut, caramel and cherry bar, was discontinued in the early 1990s.
• Fry's Five Centres, a chocolate cream bar with five fruit flavours, ended in 1992 after almost 60 years.
• Coconut Boost was discontinued in 1994. The biscuit version is now the standard Boost.
• Secret, the Rowntree Mackintosh bar with a nest of chocolate around a mousse centre, was discontinued in the late 1990s because of high production costs and low sales volumes.

For more lost sweets, see what sweets have been discontinued in the UK? and for the decade before, what sweets were popular in the 1980s?

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