There could be a rare find hiding in your Quality Street this Christmas after a shortage of foil meant two of the assortment's most famous sweets were temporarily wrapped in different colours.
A limited run of Quality Street products including tubs, pouches and cartons will include the famous hazelnut noisette (green) triangle wrapped in an unfamiliar gold colour while Quality Street fans might find the octagonal orange crunch decked in a dark bronze foil.
The chocolates themselves remain entirely unchanged and identical in every way to those normally wrapped in orange and green.
The rare packs were produced at Nestlé's Halifax factory, the home of Quality Street, when it became clear that stocks of green and orange foil would not cover a planned production run that took place last week.
Quality Street sweets can occasionally be substituted for one another when a particular sweet can't be manufactured for some reason. However, on this occasion, it was felt the change of coloured foil was a better solution to make sure as many people as possible get the full Quality Street selection this Christmas.
Quality Street's Senior Brand Manager, Jemma Handley, said: "I promise this isn't a publicity stunt. We've not added full size chocolate bars to the tin or removed the coconut flavour from a handful of tubs.
"We simply didn't have enough of the right coloured foil to cover the production run of the two sweets in question and, rather than leave them out of the selection altogether, we decided to use different colours for a very limited period."
"We are fairly sure this is the first time this has happened so anybody who finds a green triangle or an orange crunch in a different coloured foil will have something of rarity on their hands. I am pleased to say that it's the same delicious hazelnut and orange sweets inside the wrappers, regardless of their colour."
Production at the factory is now back to normal with green triangle and orange crunch restored to their traditional colour of foils while packs with the substitute foil wrappers will land on shelves at retailers across the UK & Ireland over the next few weeks.
There will be no visible difference on the outside of Quality Street products because there is no change to the sweets themselves. It means on-pack ingredient, allergen and nutritional information remains accurate and unchanged and shoppers will only know whether their triangles are green or gold when they open a pack for the first time.
It's not the only packaging change that people will find inside Quality Street this Christmas. Earlier this year Nestlé announced that cellulose wrappers used on other sweets in the Quality Street assortment are being gradually replaced with a new paper wrap. The move will remove two billion pieces of packaging from the brand's supply chain.
Ironically, before this week's temporary colour switch, the green triangle and orange crunch had been the only sweets without a change of wrapper since they were already covered in a foil-only wrap without an additional layer of cellulose.
Shoppers who want to be certain their triangle will be green and their crunch will be coloured orange should head to the Quality Street website where pick and mix tins can be personalised and where the two sweets will retain their familiar foil colours for all orders.
The Quality Street range for 2022 includes a 1.936kg tin, a 1.162kg tin, a 871g tin, a 600g tub, a 382g pouch and a 220g carton. Pick and mix personalisation stations are also back in 18 John Lewis stores around the country and Quality Street chocolate blocks in the flavours of the purple one and the orange crunch are also new for this season.
Notes to editors
• This was a one-off, limited issue caused by a shortage of stock held at our Nestlé factory. It has now been resolved. This was entirely unrelated to Nestlé's suppliers or the wider supply chain and we do not expect any repeat of the shortage.
• The production run using the alternate foil colours lasted for around three days and accounted for around 400,000 packs of Quality Street. For context, approximately 17 million packs are produced at Nestlé's Halifax factory every year.
• Quality Street was first introduced in 1936 in Halifax, West Yorkshire by Harold Mackintosh. Harold was the son of John and Violet Mackintosh who created the Toffee Deluxe as a standalone product earlier in the 20th century.
• Named after the J M Barrie play, Quality Street is still manufactured in Halifax to this day and the Nestlé factory produces more than 12 million sweets every single day in the run up to Christmas.
Contact Information
For more information, please contact the Nestlé UK press office at [email protected] or call us on 020 8667 6005. You can find our more information about Nestlé UK & Ireland at www.nestle.co.uk or follow us on Twitter at @NestleUKI