The Top 5 Retro Sweets You Can’t Get Anymore But you Wish That You Could

Everyone loves sweets, and the sweets that they remember from their childhood especially.

Although not widely available, many favourites like gobstoppers, sugar mice, sherbet pips and toffee bonbons are still manufactured to this day.

But other classics have sadly become casualties of time and ‘progress’.

At our online sweetshop we are often asked what are our most requested sweets that are no longer available. Here is our top 5 list of sweets that will make you go all misty eyed but which even we can’t get anymore:

Texan Bars
Texan is our most requested chocolate bar. Texan was a chewy nougat centre covered in milk chocolate. It was made by Macintoshes (now part of Nestle).

Launched in 1975, the Texan enjoyed huge massive success until the miners strike in the 1980s. The problem, so it is believed, was that Texan Bars were manufactured in Halifax in Yorkshire, and due to the miners blockages of major roads and sites, no-one could get the ingredients to make the Texans to the factory and so production was stopped, never to restart.

That is until late 2005 when Texans were brought back for a 6 week spell in but, despite selling like hot cakes, that was that and they are again no longer available.

Aztec Bar
Made by Cadburys and, launched in 1967. We thought, wrongly so it seems, that it was launched to coincide with the 1970 World Cup (the one where Brazil scored that fabulous goal - Carlos Alberto I think). Aztec disappeared in 1978 though we’re told it reappeared briefly, just like Texans, around the year 2000.

Aztec was a bar of nougatine (think soft nougat) and caramel covered with milk chocolate. Sounds familiar? It just couldn’t compete with the biggest bar of all time - the Mars bar (Mars and Aztec sound like they were almost identical!)

Spangles
Spangles were made by Mars and were launched in the 1950s. They were fruit flavoured square boiled sweets - in a tube (just like the cough sweet ‘Tunes’). They were taken off the market back in the early 1980's but they were re-introduced in the mid 1990s due to popular demand. However it seems that the buying public then remembered why they had not bought Spangles in larger quantities first time around and the sweets were withdrawn again.

There were a number of varieties of Spangles. Spangles themselves came in a tube of 5 flavours - strawberry, orange, lemon and lime, pineapple and blackcurrant. Old English Spangles were an eclectic mix of retro sweet flavours including butterscotch, pear drops, mint humbug, cough candy and liquorice.

Individually flavoured Spangles tubes were also launched over the year including Tangerine, Spearmint, Peppermint, Barley sugar and, perhaps most famously, Cola.

Pacers
A bit like spearmint Opal Fruits (we refuse to call them Starburst!) and made by the same company; Mars.. They were soft and chewy and delicious. They started off all white and then the manufacturers added 3 green stripes.

And then they stopped making them in the 1980s for reasons unknown. But it certainly can’t have been because they weren’t popular.

Mint Cracknell
Another bar that we think was made by Macintoshes. It was chocolate bar that actually came in 2 pieces. It was make up of a brittle mint centre (lurid green and almost like eating shards of glass) covered in milk chocolate. Not sure when it went... but it surely did - apparently due to difficulties with production. The fact that it used to cut your tongue did not help either!!!

And if that wasn’t enough, Macintoshes also made Orange Cracknell and Coffee Cracknell - though no-one seems to remember either of those.

You can still get Mint Cracknell in South Africa we are told.