The UK Just Seized Cases of Mountain Dew and Bags of Jolly Ranchers, Here’s Why
Food & Wine | December 13, 2023 | Jelisa Castrodale

In England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, it’s illegal for shops to sell Mountain Dew, Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, Lemonheads, and some other candies that are familiar to Americans.

According to the BBC, Trading Standards officers confiscated over £8,000 ($10,000) worth of illegal candies from almost two dozen different candy shops in Burton-on-Trent and Staffordshire.

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The Scotsman reports, some of the additives and compounds found in those candies include brominated vegetable oil, mineral oil, and erythrosine, which is also known as Red No. 3.

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In 2021, the Get Baked bakery in Leeds, England, was reported to Trading Standards for using illegal sprinkles that had been imported from the U.S. on some of its cakes and cookies. The problem — other than a customer who couldn’t mind their own business — was that the sprinkles contained Red No. 3.

“[The Trading Standards inspector] said they’d had reports of us using illegal sprinkles, and I actually laughed by mistake, then realized he was being serious,” Get Baked owner Rich Myers told the BBC at the time. “To whoever reported us to Trading Standards, all I have to say is: ‘Dear Lord, what a sad little life Jane’.”

The Trading Standards report meant that Get Baked had to make some of its most popular products without sprinkles. “It is HIGHLY unlikely that we will find any legal sprinkles that we will use as a replacement,” Myers wrote on Facebook. “British sprinkles just aren’t the same, they’re totally [crap] and I hate them. I am extremely passionate about sprinkles.”

If I remember my history, this is why the colonies broke from the mother country.