Apple drops

Apple drops are a type of hard candy often put into the penny sweet category which includes cola bottles and jelly beans. Ingredients can vary slightly depending on company brand but typically never stray from the long established formula which is as follows:

Sugar, glucose syrup, citric acid E330, natural flavour, natural colours E100, E141

Once extremely popular with children of the UK and Ireland especially during the 1980s/1990s, apple drops have since become a rarity with the rabid increase in large newsagent franchises, most of whom no longer stock these traditional and well established sweets as the demand simply is not there. Where apple drops were once favoured by children and adults alike for the quantity in which they were given, one would ask for a quart (quarter pound) of apple drops and receive a bag of roughly 25 units, now they are resigned to either the top shelf of smaller independent shops or bought at an extremely inflated price from companies that have re-marketed them, ironically, as a so called higher quality sweet.