Fun Dip vs the Dip Dab: The Transatlantic History of Dipping Candy
Fun Dip vs the Dip Dab: The Transatlantic History of Dipping Candy
If you grew up in Britain, you know the Dip Dab. The small yellow packet with the flat red strawberry lolly inside and a sachet of fizzy sherbet powder. You licked the lolly, dipped it in the sherbet, repeated until the powder was gone, then — if you were the kind of person who couldn't waste anything — tore the packet open and ate what was left off your finger. It was cheap, vivid, slightly chaotic and completely addictive. It is still sold today.Americans have their own version. It is called Fun Dip, and it has been around since at least the early 1950s — a full two decades before the Dip Dab arrived on British shelves. Both are dipping candies. Both involve powder and a stick. Beyond that, the differences are more interesting than you might expect.
The British Tradition: Sherbet and the Dip Dab
British sherbet is a specific thing. It is not just sweet powder — it is a fizzy sweet powder, and the fizziness is the point. The chemistry is simple: sherbet contains an edible acid (usually citric or tartaric acid) and a base (usually sodium bicarbonate). When the two come into contact with moisture — saliva, in practice — they react. Carbon dioxide bubbles form. The powder effervesces on your tongue. It tingles. It fizzes. It is, technically, a controlled chemistry experiment in your mouth, and British children have been willingly conducting it since the 19th century.The Sherbet Fountain — Barratt's tube of sherbet with a liquorice stick — has been on sale since 1925, making it one of the oldest confectionery formats still in production in the UK. The Dip Dab arrived much later, probably in the mid-1970s, inspired by the success of Swizzels Matlow's Double Dip (two sachets of sherbet and a candy stick). Barratt's version had a key difference: a strawberry-flavoured lollipop instead of a plain candy stick, which meant the lolly contributed its own flavour to the dipping experience. You dip, you dab, you repeat. The name was fairly self-explanatory.
There is, incidentally, an unresolved debate about whether Barratt's product was originally called the Dib Dab rather than the Dip Dab. People who remember buying it in the 1970s are divided. The packaging appears to have always said Dip Dab, but collective memory insists otherwise. This is the kind of argument that British confectionery inspires and that no amount of evidence fully resolves.
The American Version: Lik-M-Aid and the Birth of Fun Dip
The American dipping candy tradition started not with candy at all, but with a powdered drink mix. In the 1940s, a company called Fruzola was selling a product called Fruzola Jr. — a sweet-and-sour powder that you were supposed to pour into water to make a fruit drink. Children, with characteristic efficiency, were skipping the water and eating the powder directly from the packet. This is the origin story of an entire category of American candy: the consumer using the product in a way the manufacturer hadn't intended, and the manufacturer noticing.By the early 1950s, Sunline Inc. (which had grown out of the Fruzola company) had formalised this into a product. Lik-M-Aid — the name is not subtle — consisted of small sachets of fruit-flavoured coloured sugar powder. Trademark records point to 1952 as the earliest confirmed date. Children poured it into their mouths, tipped it into soda bottles, or ate it off a moistened finger. It required no utensil because the instructions were essentially 'open and eat.'
That changed in 1973. Sunline added the Lik-A-Stix — a pressed sugar candy stick, white, slightly chalky, faintly vanilla-sweet, with the words 'Lik.A.Stix' moulded into its surface. The stick was not a lolly. It was not a liquorice straw. It was not a neutral utensil in the way the Dip Dab's lolly is a neutral utensil. The Lik-A-Stix was candy in its own right — it just happened to also function as a dipping implement. When the two were packaged together, they gave the product a new name: Fun Dip. The candy stick transformed a packet of powder into an interactive candy system.
The Crucial Difference: Fizzy vs Not Fizzy
This is where the Dip Dab and Fun Dip fundamentally diverge. British sherbet fizzes because of the acid-bicarbonate reaction. American Fun Dip powder does not fizz. It is sweet and sharply flavoured — the cherry is very cherry, the grape is intensely grape — but there is no chemical reaction, no effervescence, no tingle. The texture is fine sugar, not the grainy reactive mixture of a sherbet fountain. If you ate Fun Dip expecting a Dip Dab experience, you would find it delicious but noticeably different: sweeter, more direct, calmer on the tongue.The Sour Fun Dip variants add a malic acid coating that creates a sharp sour hit without fizzing — more in common with the sour end of the sour candy spectrum than with fizzy sherbet. The raspberry/apple flavour has a specific party trick: it starts blue and turns green when it comes into contact with saliva. This was not in the original Lik-M-Aid formula. It is the kind of product detail that generates ten minutes of distracted licking while children work out what is happening.
The Willy Wonka Years and the Stick Debate
Nestlé acquired Fun Dip in 1989 and in 1993 folded it into the Willy Wonka Candy Company brand, alongside Nerds, Laffy Taffy and Gobstoppers. The Willy Wonka branding suited Fun Dip well — Roald Dahl's factory was the right imaginative space for a candy that changed colour in your mouth and came with its own edible utensil.The Willy Wonka era generated one of the more unusual debates in candy fandom: which part of Fun Dip is better, the powder or the stick? Lik-A-Stix enthusiasts argue that the stick is mild, slightly sweet, satisfying to eat on its own, and frankly underrated as a standalone candy. There have been petitions — actual, earnest petitions — for Ferrara Candy Company to sell the sticks separately, without the powder. The petitions have not succeeded. The powder and the stick remain inseparable.
In 2018, Nestlé sold its American confectionery brands to Ferrero, which placed Fun Dip under the Ferrara Candy Company — the same Ferrara that also makes Nerds, Jelly Belly (following their 2023 acquisition), Laffy Taffy and Gobstoppers. Fun Dip is now part of one of the largest candy portfolios in the United States.
The Range at Sweet and Glory
The Fun Dip range at Sweet and Glory covers seven active variants. The Fun Dip 12g is the original single-serve format. The Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip 39g multi-pack and the Lik-M-Aid Sour Fun Dip 39g extend the format into sour territory. The Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip Peg Bag 58g is the hanging display format for counter and shelf display. The Valentine's Maui Punch edition adds the seasonal range.For Retailers: The Dip Dab Connection Does the Work
Every British adult already gets the reference. The Dip Dab is embedded in British confectionery memory in a way that requires no explanation. A retailer introducing Fun Dip to a customer who knows the Dip Dab has a built-in shorthand: it's the American Dip Dab, except the stick is also candy, and the powder doesn't fizz but is more intensely flavoured. That conversation takes thirty seconds and typically ends in a purchase.The colour-change is content. The raspberry/apple flavour turning from blue to green when wet is reliably filmed, reliably shared, and reliably capable of surprising people who have eaten Fun Dip before and still weren't fully paying attention. Interactive candy generates content; content generates discovery.
The sour variant broadens the audience. Lik-M-Aid Sour Fun Dip positions the brand within the sour candy category as well as the nostalgic candy category. Customers who came in looking for Warheads or Toxic Waste and find Sour Fun Dip alongside them are working through a different part of the shop but reaching the same register.
