Ten sweets the nineties quietly took away from us
Discontinued, reformulated or shrunk beyond recognition. A roll call of the confectionery that did not make it out of the decade intact.
2 September 2026
Some links here are affiliate links. If you buy something through one we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we choose to write about.
Every generation thinks the sweets were better when they were nine. This one has a reasonable case, because a genuinely large number of them were discontinued outright between 1990 and 2001.
The ones that vanished completely
Some were killed by a change in ownership, some by a reformulation nobody asked for, and a few by the simple fact that they were not very good and only nostalgia says otherwise.
The ones that shrank
Shrinkflation in confectionery is real, measurable and well documented. Curly Wurly and Wagon Wheels are the two most cited examples in Britain, and in both cases the complaints are backed by the packaging weights.
Where to find them now
Retro sweet shops and online sellers stock a surprising amount of it, and eBay carries a brisk trade in packaging for the ones that are genuinely gone.