THE first limited edition of Love Hearts sweets was produced at the Swizzels Matlow factory in Derbyshire to celebrate the fairytale wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer in 1981.

This month, the latest batch of specially made Love Hearts is rolling off the production line, commissioned to celebrate the hotly anticipated June nuptials of today’s footballing royalty — Manchester United idol Wayne Rooney and fiancée Coleen McLoughlin.

For Swizzels Matlow, the company behind Love Hearts and other brands such as Parma Violets and Refreshers, which is planning its own 80th anniversary celebrations, it is a sign of how it, too, must move with the times.

“A sweet is a sweet, but you have to keep moving on and being modern and relevant while retaining the traditional flavours that everyone loves,” said Andrew Matlow, grandson of founder Alfred Matlow, who said his proudest moment was joining the family firm. He started out setting up a department to make jelly sweets and is now communications director.

Being up to date has meant tackling increasing public concerns about children’s health and rising obesity.

“These sweets are never going to be seen as a healthy alternative to the five-a-day [fruit and vegetable portions], nor should they; but we have to recognise that customers and consumers have concerns about what they eat today,” he said.

Swizzels Matlow, with a turnover of £44m, has spent the past two-and-a-half years adapting production of its 250 product lines to make them free of artificial colouring. From this month, every box of sweets leaving the factory will bear a label testifying to this fact.

Purchasing director Brian Dee, the son of another founder, David Dee, said this had not been easy to achieve, but they had been asked by a number of retailers to reformulate their products.

He said: “It is not a question of whether these artificial colourings are good or bad, it is a reflection of the way the market is going. Children don’t mind if their sweets contain tartrazine or sunset yellow, but their parents do. At the same time, children do mind if their sweets suddenly don’t look the right colour. They taste with their eyes.”

There have had to be some compromises along the way — the red writing of the Love Heart sentiments could not be replicated in natural colouring. They have now taken on a purple colour. It remains to be seen whether this will dent the sales of a sweet that was considered so symbolic of the nation that it was included in the Millennium Dome as an icon of the 20th century.

Swizzels Matlow began life in 1928, when Alfred and Maurice Matlow started Matlow Brothers in a small factory in London making jelly sweets. The brothers got together with rival factory owner David Dee in 1933 to share factory space in east London. This was the time when fizzy sweets in compressed form took off and Cach-O’s, the forerunner of the Love Heart, first rolled off the production line.

The three men relocated to a factory in New Mills, Derbyshire, during the second world war and gradually combined their workforces and salesmen. However, not so much so that old timers at the company can help telling visitors proudly that they come from the “Swizzels side of the operation”.

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