Quality Street is slimming down again for Christmas this year as its new seasonal 650g tubs hit UK supermarket shelves this week, downsized again from 720g last year.

Aficionados of the UK’s biggest Christmas confectionery brand are in for further surprises with parent company Nestlé set to reveal that it will be offering more chocolate and less toffee in assortments in its popular tubs and tins.

As well as a 650g plastic tub, the new Quality Street festive range will include a 1kg tin on sale at most major retailers, a special 800g gold tin available only from Tesco and a jumbo 2kg tin stocked by budget chain Costco. The introduction of the new 650g tub follows successive years of weight downsizing.

Chocolate lovers are regularly targeted in the phenomenon described as “shrinkflation”, when food manufacturers reduce pack sizes as ingredient and transport costs rise, hoping shoppers will not notice. Final prices are set by retailers themselves but Quality Street – along with other seasonal chocolate brands – is usually sold on special promotion in the run-up to Christmas.

Ellie Worley, Quality Street’s senior brand manager, said: “2019 is a huge year for Quality Street. We’ve got a new sweet, a new (packaging) design and are developing the brand ahead of the Christmas season.

“As ever, we have Quality Street available in lots of different formats, shapes and sizes this year including the 650g tub and much larger tins for those who want even more to share with friends and family.”

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Production at Quality Street’s factory in Halifax, West Yorkshire, is in full 24/7 Christmas mode, where it is now cranking out a staggering 12m individual chocolates a day to satisfy UK consumers’ sweet cravings and a decades-old festive tradition. It also packs 85 tins or tubs every minute.

After feedback from shoppers, Nestlé is offering more chocolate – more expensive to make – and less toffee as it ditches the toffee deluxe, adjusting the ratios in each mixed assortment so that the proportion of chocolate sweets has risen from 35% to 46%.

The toffee penny and toffee finger will remain but the new kid on the block this year is a chocolate caramel brownie in a bright teal blue wrapping. An advent calendar – introduced for the first time last year – will also go on sale in the autumn.

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Worley said that while the brand has traditionally appealed to older consumers, that is now changing: “The ‘pick n mix’ option introduced in branches of John Lewis last year – with the bonus of a personalised tin – has helped to refresh the brand and introduce it to a new, younger audience who find it an appealing format.” The chain is set to announce expansion of the scheme to more stores for this Christmas.

This year major investment in new technology by Nestlé – the world’s largest food and drink company – is helping to speed up production, using new techniques to encase individual chocolates in the familiar brightly coloured foil and cellophane “twisted” wraps. Seven new state-of-the-art machines are twice as fast as the old counterparts, wrapping up to 750 chocolates per minute compared with about 380 for the outdated equipment.

The company will open its new Institute of Packaging Sciences this week in Lausanne, Switzerland, which has been set up to evaluate and develop sustainable packaging materials.



