Love Hearts Candy
"Be mine", "All yours" and "I love you", are some of the sweet messages that grace these little candies. You just can't eat these without smiling and feeling the love, especially if your sweetheart happens to intentionally share them with you!
Love Hearts Candy was introduced in 1954, and has been tugging on our heart strings ever since!
Love Hearts are made by the confection manufacturer ,Swizzels Matlow Ltd. The factory is located along the Upper Peak Forest Canal Way which came to be in 1794. People claim that they enjoy the sweet aromas in the air as they pass by the factory. Maybe somehow, and so romantically, they create that love is in the air feeling!
Love Hearts are made by using 8 tonnes of pressure. They say this is comparable to about 6 giraffes. That's a lot of pressure! These special candies are embossed with their sweet messages in edible ink which is a secret only known by Swizzles Matlow.
Love Hearts, since they are so ideal for sharing, used to generously give away free packages of them that were attached to the popular comic book covers in the 1960's Beano and Dandy comics.
In the 1970's, Swizzles launched a product called "Happy Bits". These were similar to Love Hearts but shared messages that were hippie like and flower powered. Some of the messages were "Ban War" and "Keep Faith".
In 1991, Princess Diana came to visit the Swizzles Matlow factory. The company then produced a limited edition of Love Hearts to commemorate her visit.
The messages on Love Hearts went through a transition in the 1990's as the company wanted to be able to appeal to the younger generation. So they tried to add some modern phrases such as, " page me", "fax me", and "text me". These messages were not as popular and were dropped a few years later when the use of pagers and fax machines became much less popular.
The Swizzles Matlow factory is also as "the factory of love", as 122 employees have met and found love while working on the line. How very fitting, Love Hearts seem to conquer all!