Two individually wrapped penny chews, one black and aniseed-flavoured, one pink-and-orange and fruity, sold side by side in paper bags since the 1920s — Black Jacks and Fruit Salads have been a tuck-shop pairing for so long that most people assume they always came from the same maker. They didn't. Their shared shelf space is really the result of a century of British confectionery firms buying each other out.
Two different sweets from two different companies
Black Jack was launched in 1920 by Trebor, a London confectioner. It's a black, individually wrapped chew flavoured with aniseed — a distinctly old-fashioned flavour choice even by the standards of the 1920s, closer to liquorice than to anything fruity, and one of the few mainstream British sweets still built around it today.
Fruit Salad came from a different manufacturer entirely: Barratt, founded in London in 1848 by George Osborne Barratt, and by 1906 reckoned to be the largest confectionery manufacturer in the world. Fruit Salad followed Black Jack onto shop counters later in the 1920s, and took the opposite flavour direction — a pink-and-orange chew combining raspberry and pineapple, wrapped individually in the same paper-twist format.
Two rival firms, two similarly shaped penny chews, launched within a few years of each other. It wasn't a coordinated pairing — it just happened that both companies had hit on the same basic format at the same moment, and shopkeepers ended up stocking both side by side.
How they ended up under one roof
The pairing that seems obvious today only became a single-company product through decades of acquisitions:
- 1966 — Barratt is bought by Bassett's
- 1989 — Cadbury Schweppes buys both Bassett's (with Barratt inside it) and, separately that same year, Trebor itself, for a reported £147 million
- 1990 — Trebor and Bassett's confectionery operations are merged into Trebor Bassett, a Cadbury division
- 2008 — the whole portfolio passes to Tangerine Confectionery, later renamed Valeo Confectionery
By the time Cadbury had bought both original companies within months of each other in 1989, Black Jack and Fruit Salad were effectively already stablemates. Today, both are made by Valeo Confectionery at its Pontefract site in West Yorkshire and sold under the Barratt name — the Trebor name has otherwise disappeared from the pairing, even though it was Trebor, not Barratt, that actually invented Black Jack.
A tuck-shop fixture that outlived its own packaging
Black Jacks and Fruit Salads were the classic penny chews of the 1970s and 80s, a fixture of every corner-shop tuck-shop counter alongside the rest of Britain's loose-sweet trade. The sweets themselves have barely changed in nearly a century, though the packaging has: Black Jack's original wrapper design, which used golliwog imagery typical of the period, was redesigned decades ago as attitudes moved on, and the sweets are now made in Spain rather than the UK, even as the Barratt branding stays resolutely British.
Both sweets sit in our Barratt collection today, and Trebor's other surviving lines can be found in our separate Trebor collection — alongside the rest of the era's classics in our Retro Sweets collection.
Frequently asked questions
Who makes Black Jacks and Fruit Salads?
Originally two separate companies — Trebor made Black Jack, Barratt made Fruit Salad. Both brands are now owned by the same group, and both sweets are made by Valeo Confectionery and sold under the Barratt name.
What flavour is a Black Jack?
Aniseed — a black, individually wrapped chew.
What flavour is a Fruit Salad chew?
Raspberry and pineapple, in a pink-and-orange individually wrapped chew.
When were Black Jacks and Fruit Salads invented?
Black Jack in 1920 by Trebor; Fruit Salad later in the 1920s by Barratt.