Sweets and Dietary Needs

Almost every question we are asked about diet comes down to four ingredients: gelatine, the emulsifier E471, shellac glaze, and whatever the sweet was dusted with. Learn to spot those four on a label and you can assess most of a sweet shop yourself, including ours.

This is the largest gap between what people search for and what sweet shops actually publish: 68,690 searches a month in the UK across vegan, gelatine, halal and gluten-free questions, most of them answered by forum threads and guesswork.

The four things that decide it

1. Gelatine

A setting agent made by boiling animal collagen until it breaks down into a protein that sets liquid into a gel. It is what gives jellies, gummies, marshmallows and many chews their texture, and it is a by-product of the meat industry — which is why it is cheap and why it is in so much confectionery.

Most confectionery gelatine in Europe is pork. Beef gelatine exists but is not automatically acceptable to everyone, because it depends on how the animal was slaughtered. A sweet with no gelatine in it cannot have a gelatine problem, which is why our vegan range is where a lot of people start regardless of whether they are vegan.

Read next: Is gelatine vegan or vegetarian? and Is gelatine halal?

2. E471, the emulsifier

Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, used to stop fats and water separating. It can be made from plant oils or from animal fat, and the E number on its own does not tell you which. It turns up in chocolate and coated lines rather than in plain sugar confectionery. Where a manufacturer has specified a plant source, it is normally stated.

3. Alcohol in flavourings

Ethanol is a common carrier for flavour compounds. The amount surviving into a finished sweet is very small and it is not there to intoxicate, but positions on trace carriers differ. Liqueur centres are a separate matter entirely and are always declared.

4. Shellac (E904)

The glaze that makes some sweets and chocolate beans shine is a resin secreted by the lac insect. Rulings on insect-derived ingredients vary. It is declared on the label as shellac or E904.

Vegetarian, vegan, halal and gluten free are four different questions

They overlap, and people routinely treat one as a proxy for another. They are not interchangeable:

• Vegetarian rules out gelatine and animal-derived emulsifiers. It says nothing about alcohol carriers or shellac.
• Vegan additionally rules out shellac, beeswax, honey and dairy. It says nothing about alcohol.
• Halal is a certification question, not an ingredient list question, and different authorities take different positions on gelatine, E471 and shellac.
• Gluten free is a legal threshold — 20 parts per million or less — which depends on the factory as much as the recipe.

Vegetarian is the single most useful starting filter, because it removes the two ingredients most likely to be a problem. It is a filter, not an answer.

What we publish, and what we will not claim

Every product page on this site carries the complete ingredient declaration, the allergen statement, and the manufacturer’s “may contain” advisories reproduced verbatim rather than summarised. No competitor we audited does this on every line. It is there before you buy rather than on the packet when it arrives.

What we do not do is certify. We do not hold halal certification and we do not label individual products as halal, because that is a certification claim and it is not ours to make. Products in gluten free sweets are ones we can evidence a gluten free position for — a deliberately smaller set than the products that merely contain no gluten ingredient.

If gluten is a medical issue rather than a preference, take the final word from Coeliac UK or your dietitian, not from a sweet shop.

Where to start

If you are avoiding animal products, start with vegan sweets or vegetarian sweets. If gluten is the issue, start with gluten free sweets and read which sweets are gluten free first, because the answer is less restrictive than most people expect. If you are assessing products against a halal standard, what makes a sweet halal sets out the four checks and takes about twenty seconds a label once you know them.