What Are Marshmallows Made Of?

A marshmallow is one of the simplest things in the sweet shop and one of the most misunderstood. It is sugar, glucose syrup and water, whipped full of air and held there by a setting agent. Everything that matters about a marshmallow — whether it is vegetarian, whether it is halal, how it behaves in a hot chocolate — comes down to which setting agent the maker chose.

The four ingredients that make a marshmallow

Read the declaration on almost any bag and you will find some version of this:

• Sugar — the bulk of it, and the reason a marshmallow keeps. Sugar at this concentration is a preservative in its own right.
• Glucose syrup — stops the sugar recrystallising into a gritty texture. It is what keeps a marshmallow soft rather than turning it into a boiled sweet.
• Water — most of it is driven off during whipping, but what remains is what makes a marshmallow squash rather than snap.
• A setting agent — almost always gelatine. This is the one that decides everything else.

Then a dusting, usually cornflour and icing sugar mixed, so the pieces do not weld together in the bag. Colour and flavour go in at the end, in very small quantities.

How they are actually made

The sugar, glucose and water are boiled to around 115–120°C, which drives off most of the water and leaves a syrup concentrated enough to set. The setting agent is bloomed separately in cold water, then the hot syrup is poured onto it while a mixer runs. That mixture is whipped for several minutes, during which it roughly triples in volume, turns opaque white and stiffens.

The result is piped or slabbed, left to cure for several hours so the surface dries enough to handle, then cut and dusted. The aeration is the whole trick: a marshmallow is about half air by volume, which is why a large bag weighs so little and why the price per kilo looks higher than it feels in the hand.

Are marshmallows vegetarian or vegan?

Usually neither, and the reason is the setting agent. Standard marshmallow gelatine is animal collagen, most often pork, sometimes beef. That makes a conventional marshmallow unsuitable for vegetarians as well as vegans, which surprises people who assume a white sweet with no obvious animal ingredient must be fine.

There are three ways round it, and all three are used commercially:

• Egg white (albumen) — vegetarian but not vegan. Sets a lighter, faster-melting marshmallow.
• Aquafaba — the water from a tin of chickpeas. Whips almost exactly like egg white and is fully plant-based.
• Carrageenan, agar or a starch and pectin blend — plant setting agents. These give a firmer, slightly shorter bite than gelatine.

We publish the full ingredient declaration on every product page, so the setting agent is always visible before you buy. Our vegan sweets and vegetarian sweets ranges are filtered on exactly this. If you want the longer version of why gelatine is the deciding factor across the whole shop, that is in Is gelatine vegan or vegetarian?

Are they gluten free?

The four core ingredients contain no gluten. The risk is the dusting and the factory, not the recipe — some dusting blends use wheat starch, and shared lines carry a cross-contamination risk that gets declared as a “may contain” warning. We go through this properly in Are marshmallows gluten free?, and the products we can evidence are in gluten free sweets.

Why some marshmallows toast and others collapse

Gelatine melts at close to body temperature, which is why a gelatine marshmallow goes molten in the middle when the outside caramelises. Egg-white and plant-set marshmallows behave differently: they tend to hold their shape longer, brown less evenly, and can go grainy if pushed too hard. If you are buying specifically for toasting, gelatine-set is the traditional choice and the one that behaves the way people expect.

The same physics is why marshmallows dissolve into a hot drink rather than floating indefinitely, and it is worth knowing before you melt a bag deliberately — see how to melt marshmallows.

What about the pink ones?

Nothing structural. Pink-and-white bags are the same recipe with colour added to half the batch. The colour is declared on the pack like any other ingredient; some are plant-derived (beetroot, anthocyanins) and some are permitted synthetic colours. Certain synthetic colours carry a mandatory warning in the UK about an effect on activity and attention in children, and where that applies it appears on the label.

Buying them

Marshmallows are bulky, so buy by weight rather than by bag size and check the price per 100g we show on every listing. For parties, our how much pick and mix per person guide has working quantities. For larger orders, bulk and trade has the same lines by the kilo.

Browse the range: marshmallows.