The chocolate industry is experiencing a crunch. On Tuesday, it was reported that shrinkflation is squeezing Europe’s chocolate producers, with products shrinking as the cost of living has driven prices up by as much as 40% since 2022. Britain has not escaped the trend. It even has its own Freddo index, which tracks the price of Cadbury’s little chocolate frog: up from 27p in 2020 to 39p today.

Perhaps that’s why consumers are turning away from chocolate and towards sweets, or “candy”. This nuclear-coloured slop is typically made from sugar, glucose syrup, gelling agents, acids, colourings and flavourings. It’s less fibremaxxing than sourmaxxing, and the trend has its own online subculture: CandyTok.

This shift is well documented. Confectionery research suggests 24% of Gen Z consumers prefer sour flavours to sweet ones, compared with just 5% of Baby Boomers. Freeze-dried sweets, which transform familiar chewy products into crunchy little explosions, are particularly popular among younger shoppers. The more violent the sensation, the more popular the product.

On CandyTok, ASMR videos feature presenters rustling bags of sweets, rolling gummies through their hands and biting into them with microphones practically inside their mouths. Elsewhere, internet personalities contort their faces in ecstasy or disgust, attempting to withstand sweets so sour they can barely keep them in their mouths for 20 seconds. Nothing is ever merely meh. Meanwhile, livestreamers manufacture, pack and sell sweets, cultivating parasocial friendships with customers who can buy directly through TikTok Shop. Even a moment’s pleasure must now be shared with an audience.

An entire vocabulary accompanies all this. Blue raspberry, already an invented flavour, becomes “blu razz”, a term familiar to anyone who’s encountered a Lost Mary vape. Indeed, 61% of young British vapers favour fruit flavours. Sweet and spicy is swicy, while newstalgia describes familiar flavours repackaged in ridiculous new forms.

Of course, children have always adored this rubbish. I remember being rewarded with a Slush Puppie after swimming classes. The flavours were either blue or red, with a sourness I can vividly recall but couldn’t begin to describe. The difference is that I drank mine greedily, safely tucked into the corner of a Formica-clad council-run café, without needing all my friends to watch on a livestream.

At seven, I couldn’t distinguish sensory intensity from pleasure. Something slapping me around the face with its flavour was pleasure enough. Only later did I discover quieter pleasures that require a little patience. Chocolate, by comparison, is an almost meditative experience. Break off a square, let it warm and melt on the tongue, and savour the flavours as they unfold.

There is pleasure in letting a flavour disclose itself to you in a state of active watchfulness. It might be discerning a Left Bank Bordeaux, noticing what under-conching does to chocolate, or walking a 90-minute round trip to slowly consume a filthy, buttery bacon butty. These pleasures don’t have to be elite or expensive; they can even be decadent, but they reward attention rather than demanding an extreme reaction.

Children naturally recoil from bitterness, one of cocoa’s more interesting qualities. They’ve liked violently coloured sweets ever since they were invented, and I eventually put down the blue Slush Puppies myself. The greater challenge for a generation raised on performing every pleasure for an audience might be learning to enjoy one privately.