Candy to Can: How a Flavour That Never Existed Took Over Two Aisles
Candy to Can: How a Flavour That Never Existed Took Over Two Aisles
Most shops used to have a penny tray. It sat on the counter at about the height of a nine-year-old, and after school you stood in front of it working out what your coins would actually reach. Everything in it cost pennies and everything in it mattered enormously.
Bubblicious was in there, and Bubblicious had a specific job: it blew the biggest bubbles. That was not marketing, it was playground fact, established by testing. It was also blue, which at the time almost nothing was.
Forty-nine years after that gum launched, you can now buy Bubblicious as a soft drink. Which raises a question worth a few minutes: what exactly is being sold, if the thing survives losing the gum?
Nobody Has Ever Seen a Blue Raspberry
Start with the colour, because the colour explains everything else.
There is no such thing as a blue raspberry. Raspberries are red, and the ones that are not red are black or gold. Nothing in the fruit is blue, and nothing ever has been.
What happened was a shelf problem. By the 1950s American confectioners had too many red sweets - cherry, strawberry, raspberry, watermelon - and customers could not tell them apart at a glance. Somebody reached for blue, which nothing else was using, and gave it to raspberry. It was a display decision. It was not about flavour at all.
Seventy years later, blue raspberry is a taste that millions of people can summon on request, and every single one of them learned it from confectionery. It refers to no fruit. It refers only to other sweets. It is, in the most literal sense, a flavour that exists because sweets invented it - and that turns out to be the most portable thing a brand can own.
The Bubble Gum Wars
The gum in the penny tray was a survivor of a genuine commercial war.
Bubble Yum came first, in 1975 - the original soft chunk gum, and a shock to a category that had been chalky pink slabs since the 1920s. Warner-Lambert answered in 1977 with Bubblicious. Wrigley arrived in 1979 with Hubba Bubba and its promise of big bubbles and no troubles, then again in 1980 with Big League Chew, shredded gum in a pouch so children could chew like ballplayers without the tobacco.
Bubblicious very nearly did not make it. It sold badly for its entire first year. What saved it was the Ultimate Bubble campaign in 1978 - animated television adverts in which a child blew a bubble and was carried off by it, through space, into places that had nothing to do with gum. By 1984 the brand was remixing its own commercials with a new wave soundtrack, which tells you roughly everything about how confident it had become.
Across its life Bubblicious ran twenty-eight flavours. It was also among the first brands to put genuinely blue gum on a shelf, which is how a colour invented to solve a raspberry problem ended up in the hands of every child in Britain who had a spare few pence after school.
And Now It Is a Drink
Bubblicious is currently made under licence as a soft drink by Candy Can, a drinks company that owns no confectionery whatsoever. It buys sweet names and puts them in cans. Fruit-tella is the sensible one on that list. Bubblicious is the one worth pausing over.
Because bubblegum, as a flavour, exists specifically to be chewed and never swallowed. It has no culinary tradition. It is not a fruit, it is not a spice, it is a flavour compound designed in a laboratory for a product you spit out. And here it is, carbonated, in a can, as something you drink on purpose.
That only works because of what happened in the penny tray. The flavour was installed in a generation of heads decades ago, and once a flavour is installed it will go absolutely anywhere.
It is not even a new idea. Anyone who was in a British corner shop in the 1980s or 90s will remember the Hubba Bubba Drink - a bottle of something that tasted like nothing that had ever grown anywhere and exactly like bubblegum in liquid form. It sat in the fridge next to the Panda Pops and it was, by any reasonable measure, absurd. It was also forty years early. The current bubblegum soda is not an innovation at all; it is a revival, and the only thing that has really changed is that this time the can says Bubblicious on it. More on that era in our guide to retro British school sweets.
Everything Else Is the Same Trick
Once you see it, the whole shelf reorganises itself.
Airheads has made chew bars since 1985 and now makes soda in Blue Raspberry, Strawberry, Watermelon and Orange - the same loud artificial fruit, carbonated. Warheads is the harder trick, because Warheads has never really sold a flavour. It sells a facial expression. The five-flavour soda range has to deliver a physical event rather than a taste, and the same logic has pushed Toxic Waste into energy drinks, where a brand packaged as a hazardous waste drum turns out to fit uncomfortably well.
America has been at this longer and failed more often. Jolly Rancher Soda ran from around 2005 to 2021 across fourteen flavours before being dropped, having already tried fizzing tablets you dropped into a glass. Sour Patch Kids skipped shops entirely and turned up in fast food as shakes and slushies. Some drinks brands cut out the licensing altogether - C&C Soda rebuilt itself on Cotton Candy and Birthday Cake, confectionery flavours with no confectionery attached.
A Peanut Salesman, $970 and a Brown Paper Bag
The traffic runs harder in the other direction, and the best story in it starts on a front porch in Cincinnati.
In 1970 a peanut salesman called Will Radcliff went to a trade show in Chicago and saw a slush machine. It had been on the market for years and nobody had done much with it. He went home, sat outside with his mother Thelma and his sister Phyllis, and over a six-pack of the local beer they worked out a name. Hush puppy became Slush Puppie. Somebody wrote it down on a brown paper bag.
He put in his entire savings - $970 - and made one decision that defined the brand. Icee already existed, and Icee was carbonated. So Radcliff made his without carbonation, churned gently so the crystals stayed fine and the texture stayed soft. A deliberately different drink, from day one.
It worked absurdly well. By the 1990s there were machines in more than sixty countries and Radcliff owned two Learjets and a Mercedes with the number plate 1 SLUSH. He sold to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for $16.6 million.
Then the twist. In 2006 Cadbury sold Slush Puppie on to J&J Snack Foods - who already owned Icee. Two brands defined against each other for thirty-six years, now in the same portfolio. Both licence their names to confectioners. Both end up as sweets, on the same shelf, made under the same arrangement.
Why a Drink Ends Up in a Sweet Shop
Tango does not make sweets. Slush Puppie does not make sweets. Icee does not make sweets. A confectioner buys the right to the name and builds something the drinks company never could.
Look at what the licensed sweets actually are and the logic is obvious: dipping powders, roller lickers, sprays, squeeze tubes, freeze dried balls, popping candy. Nearly all of it is liquid or powder rather than something you bite. The natural translation of a drink into a sweet is a sweet you drink.
Tango has gone deepest of the lot - Chewbies, Bon Bons, Shockers, Mini Belters, sprays, freeze dried balls. There is arguably more Tango in a British sweet shop than in a British fridge. Vimto, invented in Manchester in 1908, has its own range and its own story, told properly in our Vimto guide.
The most literal of them is Calypso, whose Sour Wedges are shaped like citrus segments and carry the lemonade flavours across directly - Ocean Blue Lemonade included. A drink flavour, in the shape of the fruit the drink was already pretending to be. Three steps from a lemon and still recognisably itself.
Dr Pepper Has No Off Switch
No drink has travelled further into confectionery than Dr Pepper, and the list is genuinely absurd. There is a Tic Tac, made by Ferrero, that somehow gets the fizz into a mint. There is a Jelly Belly bean. There is Dr Pepper cotton candy, a candy cane sold in a three-pack alongside 7UP and A&W, and - this is real - Dr Pepper Peeps, the marshmallow chicks, sold as Easter confectionery. Jelly Belly have built a whole Soda Pop Shoppe line on the principle, with root beer, cream soda, grape and orange beside it.
It travels because nobody has ever managed to describe what Dr Pepper tastes like. The brand has leaned on that for a century - twenty-three flavours, none of them disclosed - and a flavour nobody can name is a flavour nobody can copy. It also appears to have no natural limit. Dr Pepper sausages went on sale in March 2026, which is either the logical endpoint of brand licensing or the precise moment it went too far.
Kool-Aid Has Done Every Version of This
If one brand contains the whole argument it is Kool-Aid.
It began in 1927 as a powder, invented in Nebraska for a reason with nothing to do with taste - liquid syrup was expensive to post, so the water was removed and the customer added it back at home. For decades that was the entire product: a paper sachet and a jug.
Then it became a ready-to-drink soda, which is the same flavour with the work taken out. And then it went the other way and became confectionery - Sour Shred Headz, Cotton Candy Bubblegum, Popping Cotton Candy.
Powder, drink, sweet, across almost a century. Kool-Aid does not own a product. It owns a taste that several generations of Americans learned before they could read, and a taste will go anywhere you can put it.
For Retailers: Why Crossovers Earn Their Space
A crossover explains itself on the shelf, which is rarer than it sounds. A customer who has never heard of your newest sour soda understands it immediately if the can says Warheads. That is shelf space needing no sampling, no signage and no explanation.
They also work in two places at once. A Tango sweet belongs in the confectionery fixture and beside the soft drinks; an Airheads soda works in the chiller and in an American candy display. Stock both halves of a brand, site them together, and two products become one idea - which is the version customers photograph.
And they start conversations, which is as close as confectionery gets to free advertising. Bubblegum soda is a thing people pick up to show somebody else.
Buy Crossover Sweets and Drinks Wholesale
Sweet and Glory stocks both sides of the trade - American and British confectionery alongside the imported soft drinks range, from Manchester.
No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester. Create a free account to browse and order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is blue raspberry a real fruit? No. There is no blue raspberry and there never has been. The colour was given to raspberry by American confectioners in the 1950s because too many sweets on the shelf were red and customers kept confusing raspberry with cherry. It was a display decision. The flavour has been learned entirely from sweets ever since - it refers to nothing in nature, only to other confectionery.
When did Bubblicious come out? 1977, launched by Warner-Lambert to compete with Bubble Yum, which had created the soft chunk gum category two years earlier. It sold badly for a year and was rescued by the 1978 Ultimate Bubble adverts, in which children blew a bubble and were carried off through space by it. It ran twenty-eight flavours over its life and was among the first brands to put blue gum on a shelf.
Who invented Slush Puppie? Will Radcliff, a peanut salesman from Cincinnati, in 1970. He saw a slush machine at a Chicago trade show, named it on his front porch with his mother and sister after the hush puppy, wrote it on a brown paper bag and started the company with $970. He made it non-carbonated deliberately, to be different from Icee.
Are Slush Puppie and Icee owned by the same company? They are now. Radcliff built Slush Puppie specifically as the non-carbonated alternative to Icee and sold it to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for $16.6 million. Cadbury sold it on in 2006 to J&J Snack Foods, who already owned Icee. Two brands built in opposition ended up under one owner.
Does Tango make its own sweets? No. Tango is a soft drink brand and the confectionery is made under licence by specialist confectioners. The drink brand supplies the name and the flavour; the confectioner supplies everything else. That is why licensed drink sweets are nearly all powders, sprays and lickers rather than bars - the format follows the drink.
Where can I buy crossover sweets and drinks wholesale? Sweet and Glory stocks both sides - candy-brand sodas and drink-brand confectionery - wholesale from Manchester with no minimum order. Create a free account to browse and order.
Related guides: Bubblegum: the complete guide · Best American sodas in the UK · C&C Soda: every flavour · Retro American candy: the 80s and 90s · Calypso lemonade complete guide · Vimto: the Manchester original
Most shops used to have a penny tray. It sat on the counter at about the height of a nine-year-old, and after school you stood in front of it working out what your coins would actually reach. Everything in it cost pennies and everything in it mattered enormously.
Bubblicious was in there, and Bubblicious had a specific job: it blew the biggest bubbles. That was not marketing, it was playground fact, established by testing. It was also blue, which at the time almost nothing was.
Forty-nine years after that gum launched, you can now buy Bubblicious as a soft drink. Which raises a question worth a few minutes: what exactly is being sold, if the thing survives losing the gum?
Nobody Has Ever Seen a Blue Raspberry
Start with the colour, because the colour explains everything else.
There is no such thing as a blue raspberry. Raspberries are red, and the ones that are not red are black or gold. Nothing in the fruit is blue, and nothing ever has been.
What happened was a shelf problem. By the 1950s American confectioners had too many red sweets - cherry, strawberry, raspberry, watermelon - and customers could not tell them apart at a glance. Somebody reached for blue, which nothing else was using, and gave it to raspberry. It was a display decision. It was not about flavour at all.
Seventy years later, blue raspberry is a taste that millions of people can summon on request, and every single one of them learned it from confectionery. It refers to no fruit. It refers only to other sweets. It is, in the most literal sense, a flavour that exists because sweets invented it - and that turns out to be the most portable thing a brand can own.
The Bubble Gum Wars
The gum in the penny tray was a survivor of a genuine commercial war.
Bubble Yum came first, in 1975 - the original soft chunk gum, and a shock to a category that had been chalky pink slabs since the 1920s. Warner-Lambert answered in 1977 with Bubblicious. Wrigley arrived in 1979 with Hubba Bubba and its promise of big bubbles and no troubles, then again in 1980 with Big League Chew, shredded gum in a pouch so children could chew like ballplayers without the tobacco.
Bubblicious very nearly did not make it. It sold badly for its entire first year. What saved it was the Ultimate Bubble campaign in 1978 - animated television adverts in which a child blew a bubble and was carried off by it, through space, into places that had nothing to do with gum. By 1984 the brand was remixing its own commercials with a new wave soundtrack, which tells you roughly everything about how confident it had become.
Across its life Bubblicious ran twenty-eight flavours. It was also among the first brands to put genuinely blue gum on a shelf, which is how a colour invented to solve a raspberry problem ended up in the hands of every child in Britain who had a spare few pence after school.
And Now It Is a Drink
Bubblicious is currently made under licence as a soft drink by Candy Can, a drinks company that owns no confectionery whatsoever. It buys sweet names and puts them in cans. Fruit-tella is the sensible one on that list. Bubblicious is the one worth pausing over.
Because bubblegum, as a flavour, exists specifically to be chewed and never swallowed. It has no culinary tradition. It is not a fruit, it is not a spice, it is a flavour compound designed in a laboratory for a product you spit out. And here it is, carbonated, in a can, as something you drink on purpose.
That only works because of what happened in the penny tray. The flavour was installed in a generation of heads decades ago, and once a flavour is installed it will go absolutely anywhere.
It is not even a new idea. Anyone who was in a British corner shop in the 1980s or 90s will remember the Hubba Bubba Drink - a bottle of something that tasted like nothing that had ever grown anywhere and exactly like bubblegum in liquid form. It sat in the fridge next to the Panda Pops and it was, by any reasonable measure, absurd. It was also forty years early. The current bubblegum soda is not an innovation at all; it is a revival, and the only thing that has really changed is that this time the can says Bubblicious on it. More on that era in our guide to retro British school sweets.
Everything Else Is the Same Trick
Once you see it, the whole shelf reorganises itself.
Airheads has made chew bars since 1985 and now makes soda in Blue Raspberry, Strawberry, Watermelon and Orange - the same loud artificial fruit, carbonated. Warheads is the harder trick, because Warheads has never really sold a flavour. It sells a facial expression. The five-flavour soda range has to deliver a physical event rather than a taste, and the same logic has pushed Toxic Waste into energy drinks, where a brand packaged as a hazardous waste drum turns out to fit uncomfortably well.
America has been at this longer and failed more often. Jolly Rancher Soda ran from around 2005 to 2021 across fourteen flavours before being dropped, having already tried fizzing tablets you dropped into a glass. Sour Patch Kids skipped shops entirely and turned up in fast food as shakes and slushies. Some drinks brands cut out the licensing altogether - C&C Soda rebuilt itself on Cotton Candy and Birthday Cake, confectionery flavours with no confectionery attached.
A Peanut Salesman, $970 and a Brown Paper Bag
The traffic runs harder in the other direction, and the best story in it starts on a front porch in Cincinnati.
In 1970 a peanut salesman called Will Radcliff went to a trade show in Chicago and saw a slush machine. It had been on the market for years and nobody had done much with it. He went home, sat outside with his mother Thelma and his sister Phyllis, and over a six-pack of the local beer they worked out a name. Hush puppy became Slush Puppie. Somebody wrote it down on a brown paper bag.
He put in his entire savings - $970 - and made one decision that defined the brand. Icee already existed, and Icee was carbonated. So Radcliff made his without carbonation, churned gently so the crystals stayed fine and the texture stayed soft. A deliberately different drink, from day one.
It worked absurdly well. By the 1990s there were machines in more than sixty countries and Radcliff owned two Learjets and a Mercedes with the number plate 1 SLUSH. He sold to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for $16.6 million.
Then the twist. In 2006 Cadbury sold Slush Puppie on to J&J Snack Foods - who already owned Icee. Two brands defined against each other for thirty-six years, now in the same portfolio. Both licence their names to confectioners. Both end up as sweets, on the same shelf, made under the same arrangement.
Why a Drink Ends Up in a Sweet Shop
Tango does not make sweets. Slush Puppie does not make sweets. Icee does not make sweets. A confectioner buys the right to the name and builds something the drinks company never could.
Look at what the licensed sweets actually are and the logic is obvious: dipping powders, roller lickers, sprays, squeeze tubes, freeze dried balls, popping candy. Nearly all of it is liquid or powder rather than something you bite. The natural translation of a drink into a sweet is a sweet you drink.
Tango has gone deepest of the lot - Chewbies, Bon Bons, Shockers, Mini Belters, sprays, freeze dried balls. There is arguably more Tango in a British sweet shop than in a British fridge. Vimto, invented in Manchester in 1908, has its own range and its own story, told properly in our Vimto guide.
The most literal of them is Calypso, whose Sour Wedges are shaped like citrus segments and carry the lemonade flavours across directly - Ocean Blue Lemonade included. A drink flavour, in the shape of the fruit the drink was already pretending to be. Three steps from a lemon and still recognisably itself.
Dr Pepper Has No Off Switch
No drink has travelled further into confectionery than Dr Pepper, and the list is genuinely absurd. There is a Tic Tac, made by Ferrero, that somehow gets the fizz into a mint. There is a Jelly Belly bean. There is Dr Pepper cotton candy, a candy cane sold in a three-pack alongside 7UP and A&W, and - this is real - Dr Pepper Peeps, the marshmallow chicks, sold as Easter confectionery. Jelly Belly have built a whole Soda Pop Shoppe line on the principle, with root beer, cream soda, grape and orange beside it.
It travels because nobody has ever managed to describe what Dr Pepper tastes like. The brand has leaned on that for a century - twenty-three flavours, none of them disclosed - and a flavour nobody can name is a flavour nobody can copy. It also appears to have no natural limit. Dr Pepper sausages went on sale in March 2026, which is either the logical endpoint of brand licensing or the precise moment it went too far.
Kool-Aid Has Done Every Version of This
If one brand contains the whole argument it is Kool-Aid.
It began in 1927 as a powder, invented in Nebraska for a reason with nothing to do with taste - liquid syrup was expensive to post, so the water was removed and the customer added it back at home. For decades that was the entire product: a paper sachet and a jug.
Then it became a ready-to-drink soda, which is the same flavour with the work taken out. And then it went the other way and became confectionery - Sour Shred Headz, Cotton Candy Bubblegum, Popping Cotton Candy.
Powder, drink, sweet, across almost a century. Kool-Aid does not own a product. It owns a taste that several generations of Americans learned before they could read, and a taste will go anywhere you can put it.
For Retailers: Why Crossovers Earn Their Space
A crossover explains itself on the shelf, which is rarer than it sounds. A customer who has never heard of your newest sour soda understands it immediately if the can says Warheads. That is shelf space needing no sampling, no signage and no explanation.
They also work in two places at once. A Tango sweet belongs in the confectionery fixture and beside the soft drinks; an Airheads soda works in the chiller and in an American candy display. Stock both halves of a brand, site them together, and two products become one idea - which is the version customers photograph.
And they start conversations, which is as close as confectionery gets to free advertising. Bubblegum soda is a thing people pick up to show somebody else.
Buy Crossover Sweets and Drinks Wholesale
Sweet and Glory stocks both sides of the trade - American and British confectionery alongside the imported soft drinks range, from Manchester.
No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester. Create a free account to browse and order.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is blue raspberry a real fruit? No. There is no blue raspberry and there never has been. The colour was given to raspberry by American confectioners in the 1950s because too many sweets on the shelf were red and customers kept confusing raspberry with cherry. It was a display decision. The flavour has been learned entirely from sweets ever since - it refers to nothing in nature, only to other confectionery.
When did Bubblicious come out? 1977, launched by Warner-Lambert to compete with Bubble Yum, which had created the soft chunk gum category two years earlier. It sold badly for a year and was rescued by the 1978 Ultimate Bubble adverts, in which children blew a bubble and were carried off through space by it. It ran twenty-eight flavours over its life and was among the first brands to put blue gum on a shelf.
Who invented Slush Puppie? Will Radcliff, a peanut salesman from Cincinnati, in 1970. He saw a slush machine at a Chicago trade show, named it on his front porch with his mother and sister after the hush puppy, wrote it on a brown paper bag and started the company with $970. He made it non-carbonated deliberately, to be different from Icee.
Are Slush Puppie and Icee owned by the same company? They are now. Radcliff built Slush Puppie specifically as the non-carbonated alternative to Icee and sold it to Cadbury Schweppes in 2000 for $16.6 million. Cadbury sold it on in 2006 to J&J Snack Foods, who already owned Icee. Two brands built in opposition ended up under one owner.
Does Tango make its own sweets? No. Tango is a soft drink brand and the confectionery is made under licence by specialist confectioners. The drink brand supplies the name and the flavour; the confectioner supplies everything else. That is why licensed drink sweets are nearly all powders, sprays and lickers rather than bars - the format follows the drink.
Where can I buy crossover sweets and drinks wholesale? Sweet and Glory stocks both sides - candy-brand sodas and drink-brand confectionery - wholesale from Manchester with no minimum order. Create a free account to browse and order.
Related guides: Bubblegum: the complete guide · Best American sodas in the UK · C&C Soda: every flavour · Retro American candy: the 80s and 90s · Calypso lemonade complete guide · Vimto: the Manchester original
