How Many Calories Are in One Sweet?

Nutrition panels are printed per 100g, which is a useless unit if what you actually want to know is what one sweet costs you. Most single sweets land between 3 and 20 kcal — but a lolly can be five times that.

We hold two numbers for a lot of our range: the piece weight the supplier declares, and the per-100g panel. Put those together and the per-sweet figure falls out. Everything below is worked that way from products on this site — 231 of our lines carry both numbers.

The ones people ask about most

These come up again and again, so here they are first, with the arithmetic shown.

How many calories in a Drumstick lolly?

About 54 calories, with 11.4g of sugar — close to three teaspoons. It is the biggest single sweet in this list at 13g, and a lolly is eaten slowly, which is rather the point of it.

How many calories in a Parma Violet?

About 30 calories and 6.8g of sugar for the rolls we stock, which weigh 7.3g each. Small, but very nearly all sugar. They are also vegan.

How many calories in a Refresher?

The chew works out at roughly 44 calories and 9.4g of sugar per sweet at 10.8g.

The wider picture

The size of the sweet matters more than the type

The pattern in those tables is not about chocolate versus gum or fizzy versus plain. It is almost entirely weight. A Drumstick lolly has seventeen times the calories of a pip because it is sixteen times the size. Chocolate is the one genuine exception — chocolate peanuts pack 10.5 kcal into 1.9g because fat carries more than twice the calories per gram that sugar does.

Which is worth knowing when you are filling a party bag or a pick and mix. Ten small sweets can cost you less than one lolly.

Sugar free does not mean calorie free

Look at the two chocolate limes: the ordinary one is 31 calories with 5.5g of sugar, the sugar free one 16.6 calories with none. Sugar free sweets are sweetened with maltitol, isomalt and sorbitol, which are carbohydrates with calories in them — fewer than sugar, but not none. What they mainly change is the effect on blood glucose and on teeth.

More in are sugar free sweets OK for diabetics and are mints good for your teeth.

How much is in a 200g bag?

Take the piece weight and divide. A 200g bag of aniseed balls at 2.5g each is about 80 sweets. The same bag of Vimto jelly babies at 6g each is about 33. Drumstick lollies at 13g, about 15. That is usually the number people actually want when they are working out party bags — there is a fuller version in how much pick and mix do you need per person.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure here is derived from the supplier declaration published on the product page it refers to, not from a general nutrition database. Suppliers reformulate and piece weights drift, so the product page is the authority. If a panel there disagrees with this table, the panel is right and we would be glad to be told.