We’ve all been there: reaching into a tin of Quality Street, Roses, Heroes or Celebrations only to be disappointed with either a Milky Way or the leftover chewy caramel hiding among the empty sweet wrappers.
You’re not alone in your disappointment. The consumer group Which? has polled chocolate fans and found that our favourite selection boxes truly don’t contain enough of your favourites, which means you can stop blaming your siblings for stealing them all now.
It has ranked the chocolate flavours in each of our favourite selection tubs according to popularity, to determine what proportion of each makes up the perfect assortment before comparing with the actual contents of the tubs.
What Which? found was that most popular flavours were under-represented, while there were more of the less-loved ones.
In a tub of Quality Street, it found the Purple One and the Green Triangle to be the favourite chocolates in the box – however, there are only five and six in a tub, respectively.
In a tub of Heroes, Wispas and Twirls were the most highly coveted chocs, but were also the scantest in the selection – an average of 9 and 6 in a box.
Malteser Teasers were found to be the most popular chocolate in a box of Celebrations – but fans will be pleased to hear that with an average of 10 in each tub, they are also one of the most abundant chocolates in the pack.
Bounty was somehow found to be the second most popular treat in the pack.
It also created an ideal assortment after polling 1,000 customers. Heroes fans wanted to see more Wispas and fewer Eclairs; Celebrations fans wanted to see more Malteser Teasers and fewer Milky Ways; fans of Roses wanted to see more Hazelnut in Caramels and fewer Caramel Bites; and Quality Street fans wanted tins to contain more Purple One and fewer Strawberry Delights.
“Our analysis shows that it’s not your family’s fault that your favourite flavours disappear from the tub so quickly: there really are too few Purple Ones to meet popular demand,” Harry Rose, Which? magazine editor, said.