Every family has their own Christmas tradition - and an overwhelming number of them include buying a tub of Quality Street as soon as they hit supermarket shelves. Whether you've been munching on them throughout December, or have been saving them for the big day, we have taken a look inside a box to see just how many sweets you can expect this year.
The Nestle sweets date back to 1936 when they contained a mix of 18 individually wrapped different sweets, including 11 chocolates and seven toffees. At a cost of two shillings, which is about £7.50 today with inflation, only the lucky ones would have been able to afford a box of the iconic sweets.
Today, a 600g box costs £4 at most shops and contains around 66 sweets, depending on the variety you end up with.
Many people would argue that you can never have too many of the Purple One and Caramel Swirls - and have been left disappointed after opening the box to find it mostly filled with orange-packaged sweets.
However, it appears Quality Street is trying to more evenly split their selection of 11 sweets, so everybody in the family can munch down a couple of their favourites.
My Quality Street box broke down to:
The Green Triangle: 5
The Purple One: 5
Fudge: 8
Strawberry Delight: 7
Orange Chocolate Crunch: 6
Toffee Finger: 7
Milk Choc Block: 4
Toffee Penny: 6
Coconut Éclair: 5
Caramel Swirl: 7
Orange Crème: 6
While I would happily swap all of the Coconut Eclairs for more of the Caramel Swirls, I believe this year's box has a better ratio than those I've had in previous years.
However, it's perhaps not so good if you were after the Milk Choc Bolcks...
This comes after a chocolate fan went viral last year for calling out Quality Street for their 'inequality" after opening his box to find just four of The Purple Ones inside.
In his Twitter post, he wrote: "Bit of spare time on my hands today so I audited the unopened Quality Street tin. Just 4 purples (4.7%) and yet a massive 11 (12.9%) orange ones. Another blow for 2020. Who do I complain to?"
In response, another user counted theirs up before saying: "Just done the same, to check consumer variance. I have 7.5% purple and 11.9%. Interesting, but seeing as I don't like nuts, I'm happy with the ratios myself."
Many of this year's Quality Street boxes included their new recyclable wrappers - with the iconic Green Triangle wrapped in orange foil.
On the back of this year's boxes, it reads: "Positive change on packaging. We're aiming to remove over two billion pieces of packaging materials by 2023 in our move to recyclable wrappers, as part of our journey to make all Quality Street packaging recycle, you will start to see some new paper-based wrappers in packs, but the delicious sweets inside remain unchanged."
During The Mirror's recent visit to the Quality Street factory in York, Emily Grimbley, who has been working with the brand team at Nestle since 2020, explained how they decide what goes into their boxes each year.
She said: "So we do a lot of research and speak to a lot of consumers, but everyone's got different favourites and a different opinion, so we're trying to please everyone.
"We categorise it into toffees, creams and chocolate sweets and try and do a fair mix of them so that there's something for everyone in there.
"We've also got our sweets that have been in there from the start - the Purple One, the Green Triangle, Caramel Swirl and Toffee Finger. They are the iconic sweets that have to stay within the brand as they have that heritage and then the others fall in the bucket to create a perfect mix. Although there's a lot of debate on what the perfect mix is..."
The company tries to avoid axing products as much as possible as to not cause upset amongst their lifelong fans.
Emily added: "People love Quality Street and they don't like us to mess with it too much so we know that all of the sweets in there are really loved by our consumers and they're really passionate about them, so I don't feel like there's too much need to mix it up.
"We don't axe sweets from the tubs very often because it causes outrage, but when we do, it all comes down to consumer research, speaking to customers and then trying to see whether we can optimise the mix to give people a better experience.
"So one of the big ones we took out was the Toffee Deluxe, as we know that consumers really like chocolate sweets, so then we only had two toffee ones in the tub and more chocolate.
"It's just trying to get that balance right."
