Ask ten people what a bon bon is and you'll get ten answers. In France it's a catch-all word for a sweet. In the US it usually means a chocolate-covered ice cream ball. But in Britain — and in the sweet jars that Scandinavian pick-and-mix fans keep coming back for — a bon bon is something very specific: a sugar-dusted, fruit-or-toffee flavoured chew, sold by weight, and eaten slowly.
What confuses most people is that there are really two different sweets sharing the name. One is firm and toffee-dense. The other is soft and springy. They look almost identical in the jar. They eat completely differently.
The traditional bon bon: a firm, slow chew
This is the original. A dense, toffee-based centre rolled in a fine dusting of powdered sugar — often with a slightly sour tang to it.
Bristows of Devon, who have been making confectionery in Crediton since 1932, describe the eating experience exactly right on their own product range: you "suck away the sweetly sour sugar coating to get to the Devon toffee centre." That's the whole point of a traditional bon bon. It isn't a sweet you chew through in five seconds. The dusting goes first, then you hit a centre that resists you.
Look at what's actually in one and the firmness makes sense. Bristows' traditional toffee bon bons are built on sugar, glucose syrup, fat, whey powder, skimmed milk powder, cornflour and real butter. That's a dairy toffee recipe. Milk solids, butterfat and a hard boil to a low final moisture content are what give you that dense, almost waxy resistance and the slight caramelised note underneath the flavour. It's toffee behaviour, not gum behaviour.
Texture varies a little batch to batch and softens as the sweet ages — a very normal trait of a boiled, milk-based confection, and one of the reasons stock rotation matters if you sell them.
Typical piece weight is around 3.5–6.5g, so you're looking at roughly 35–40 pieces in a 200g bag. Traditional flavours stay close to the sweet-shop canon: toffee, strawberry, lemon, salted caramel, blue raspberry.
The chewy bon bon: soft the whole way through
The chewy bon bon is the modern reworking. Same sugar dusting, same shape, same jar — but the centre gives way immediately and stays pliable. No hard shell, no resistance, no build-up. Soft from the first bite to the last.
The recipe tells a different story here. Bristows' chewy rhubarb and custard bon bons are made from sugar, glucose syrup, vegetable fat, maltodextrin, sorbitol, citric acid and dextrose, with natural colours from beetroot and turmeric. Sorbitol is a humectant — it holds moisture in the sweet and stops the sugar setting hard. Maltodextrin softens the body. Citric acid brings the sour edge that used to come from the coating alone.
In other words: the chewiness isn't an accident of a shorter boil, it's formulated in. And notably, several chewy varieties skip the milk powder and butter entirely, which makes them a better fit for customers avoiding dairy — always check the individual pack, since chewy toffee versions do contain milk.
Chewy ranges also run much wider on flavour, because a soft base carries bright fruit better than a toffee base does: blue raspberry, cherry, watermelon, apple, bubblegum, liquorice, lemon, strawberry, rhubarb and custard.
Which should you buy?
If you remember bon bons from a paper bag at the corner shop and want that sweet — the one that lasted the whole walk home — you want traditional. If you're buying for children, for a pick-and-mix table, or you just want the flavour without the jaw work, go chewy.
The honest answer for most sweet jars is both. They sit in completely different places on the texture map, and customers who love one frequently don't love the other.
A note on who makes them
Not all bon bons are equal, and the manufacturer matters more than the flavour name on the bag. Bristows of Devon are the benchmark for a reason — West Country producers since 1932, BRC Food certified, part of the Great British Confectionery Group, and committed to local ingredients including real clotted cream in their toffee and fudge lines. They've also pushed the category forward with a Mocktail bon bon range — Peach Bellini, Mojito, Gin & Lemon — aimed squarely at grown-ups.
That's a 90-year-old recipe book behind a sweet most people think of as simple. It isn't.
