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How Many Quality Street Tubs Do You Need To Make One Full Of Green Triangles?

Each December, a tub of Quality Street can be found close to my Christmas tree. Quality Street tubs (alongside tubs of Cadbury Roses, Cadbury Heroes, and Mars Celebrations) have been a firm fixture of my Christmas traditions for as long as I can remember.

When I chatted to Matt at Nestlé about Quality Street's latest addition last week, he mentioned that the ratio of sweets inside a standard 650g purple tub is a closely guarded secret.

Machines control the average distribution of chocolates by weight against the secret Nestlé ratio. The result is that each tub will be mostly similar, but may well have slight differences here and there.

Green Triangles Being packaged at Nestle Halifax
Quantities of each chocolate are controlled by computers. Photo credit to Nestlé

My curiosity about the secret ratio, and Tesco's £3.50-a-tub deal, got the better of me. So, I have to now admit I started my Christmas food shopping in September. This year, I'm part of the reason why supermarkets put out their Christmas goodies as soon as the kids went back to school. For that, I'm truly sorry.

But, equipped with a randomly selected Quality Street tub, I can now answer the question I've had for a long time - how many tubs would I need to create a tub exclusively filled with just Green Triangles? (Why Green Triangles? Everyone knows they're the best ones...)

New: Chocolate Caramel Brownie

Buying a tub gave me the opportunity to try the new Chocolate Caramel Brownie sweet. This cyan-wrapped circular chocolate replaces the brown-wrapped Toffee Deluxe.

Quality Street Chocolate Caramel Brownie
The new Chocolate Caramel Brownie sweet in cyan blue wrapper

The domed chocolate shell decorated with a swirl on the top is made from typical Quality Street chocolate, but with a much thicker base. Together with the ultra sweet chocolate flavoured caramel, it does exhibit a cake-like quality overall. Sort of.

Inside the Quality Street Chocolate Caramel Brownie
A runny, sticky, sweet caramel oozes from the Chocolate Caramel Brownie sweet

I wasn't a fan of Toffee Deluxe (nor toffees in general), so I feel it's an improvement. But the overly-sweet Chocolate Caramel Brownie isn't distinctive enough to rival any of my favourites.

What's in the tub?

My box weighed in at 648g including wrappers, so just two grams less than the average weight of 650g. I received 66 chocolates in my tub, so each chocolate, on average, weighed 9.81 grams.

Quality Street tub for 2019
Inside my 650g Quality Street tub

Here's the breakdown by sweet:

SweetQuantityPercentage
Caramel Swirl69.09%
Chocolate Caramel Brownie57.58%
Coconut Eclair69.09%
Fudge710.61%
Green Triangle46.06%
Milk Choc Block34.55%
Orange Chocolate Crunch57.58%
Orange Creme812.12%
Purple One57.58%
Strawberry Delight812.12%
Toffee Finger46.06%
Toffee Penny57.58%

And here it is again but in a funky chart:

Quality Street Tub Breakdown 2019
The contents of my tub of Quality Street

It's undeniable that the dominant sweets in my tub are the orange and strawberry cremes, as well as fudge. I expected to find the Green Triangle propping up the bottom of the table but in fact it was the Milk Choc Block, closely followed, surprisingly, by the Toffee Finger.

Breakdown of Quality Street sweets by colour

To get a better understanding of what types of sweet were in my tub, I grouped them up into the broad categories of caramels, chocolates, toffees and fudges, plus fruit cremes.

TypeQuantityPercentage
Caramels1624.24%
Chocolates1827.27%
Fruit Cremes1624.24%
Toffees & Fudges1624.24%

Again, here's another beautiful chart:

Quality Street Tub Breakdown by category 2019
A pretty even split between cremes, caramels, toffees, and chocolates

The split here is incredibly close, clocking in at around a quarter of the tub for each category. So while I felt my assortment was geared towards fruit cremes, this was not the case in reality.

This is the point of this exercise. Our perception of proportions are skewed based on what's usually left at the bottom of the tub, or the fact there's never enough of our favourites. The reality, however, is that you're likely to get as many toffees as fruit cremes, and as many caramels as chocolates in your tub.

What about the Green Triangles?

My favourite Quality Street for a long time has been the green-foiled hazelnut noisette, better known as the Green Triangle. It's closely followed by the Purple One (a milk chocolate shell filled with caramel and a hazelnut) and the Strawberry Creme.

Quality Street Green Triangles
Green Triangles, one of the most popular varieties in Quality Street

Like countless others, I live in the hope of one day unboxing a Quality Street tub to discover the robots went haywire, inadvertently filling a tub full of just green triangles. The reality is that this is incredibly unlikely, but I have wondered how many tubs I'd need to buy in order to make my very own 'Quality Street Green Triangles' tub.

In my tub, the Green Triangles clocked in at an average 7.75 grams a pop. To fill a 650g tub based on my selection above, I'd need 84 Green Triangles. Therefore, I'd need 21 tubs of Quality Street to realise my dream. At the RRP of £5 a tub, that's £105 in the quest of confection perfection.

What about the other sweets?

Are you daring to suggest the Green Triangle isn't the best? Outrageous! Still, here's a handy table showing the average weight of each sweet in my box and the amount of tubs needed to make a 650g single-flavour tub, based on the distribution I found in my tub:

SweetAverage WeightTubs Required
Caramel Swirl9.67g12
Chocolate Caramel Brownie9.67g14
Coconut Eclair11.17g10
Fudge10.86g9
Green Triangle7.75g21
Milk Choc Block9.33g24
Orange Chocolate Crunch9.20g15
Orange Creme10.75g8
Purple One11.80g12
Strawberry Delight11.00g8
Toffee Finger10.00g17
Toffee Penny7.00g19

Understandably, it'd be much easier - and cheaper - to make a single-flavour 650g tub based on strawberry cremes, orange cremes, or fudges. You'd need deep pockets to achieve the same using the milk chocolate blocks, Green Triangles, or Toffee Pennies.

2019's Quality Street tub lid
A close-up of the Quality Street 650g plastic tub

So there you go. When the question comes up in a pub quiz, you'll now know you need to spend in the region of £40 and £120 to buy the tubs you need to put together your very own DIY single-flavour Quality Street tub. You're welcome.

Having got my geek on, I now need to reel off a disclaimer. My geekiness was fuelled by the results of a single, randomly selected tub of Quality Street. The statistics above are just for fun, and are by no means precise due to the small sample size and the lack of scientific measuring instruments. But I found the data fascinating to research nevertheless.

Perhaps we can crowdsource data? If you fancy getting involved, post your Quality Street tub weights and sweet counts in the comments below, and together we can see how accurate my tub reflects the general population, and if there are any major differences.

Disclosure: I purchased a 650g tub of Nestlé Quality Street from Tesco for £3.50. I was not asked to write anything about it. My opinions are my own.

6 Comments

  • Strange that you bought a tub with the origional colourful foil wrappers instead of the drab new greased paper wraps that are in all the other tubs of QS this year!
    I will not buy them again fed up of faceless marketing types changing them without consultation when we pay the price, same with roses always bought at least one of each, has been a family tradition since childhood but no longer, am searching for viable replacements…

  • Excellent analysis. I do love a bit of selection box statistics.

    My least favorite ones are orange and strawberry creams. I am thinking fondant is cheap. Would love to see if cost to produce correlates inversely to quantity in a tin. Could you ask your contacts at the factory?

    That said, I used to adore the ill fated gooseberry cream which sadly was deleted many years ago.

    Fudge rhomboid, toffee finger, the illusive green triangle and the purple nutty one are all favorites even though the nutty one is cheekily shaped like a Brazil nut shell and yet only contains a cheaper hazelnut.

    • I’m glad I’m not the only one who likes to geek out over Christmas selection tubs!

      You are correct in the observation that there are greater quantities of the sweets that contain cheaper ingredients. In an age where costs need to be capped and profits maximised, it’s inevitable that we’ll see more of the sugar-based sweets appearing in the selection tubs in the coming years, at the cost of nut-based options.

      That’s not always a bad thing, especially if there’s interesting flavours at play. I don’t remember the gooseberry cream but would love to see it return. There’s not enough gooseberry and rhubarb flavours in products in the UK!

      The coffee cream is making a comeback in 2023 in John Lewis stores, so it may be that we’ll see the gooseberry cream make a comeback in the next few years.

  • I have purchased my last tub of quality street. The centre’s have changed so much and the quality of the chocolate has deteriorated so much that I don’t enjoy them any more. Even the quality of the hazelnut I side the purple one is poor. Sorry but that’s it. Bye.

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