Tip out a tube of Rowntree's Randoms and you might get a saxophone, a roller-blade, a puzzle piece and a bus, all shaped from fruit gum, and the entire point of the sweet is that your friend's tube never matches yours.
A 2009 launch built on Rowntree's fruit gum heritage
Rowntree's Randoms launched in the UK on 18 May 2009, produced by Nestlé under the Rowntree's name, a brand with roots stretching back to 1881 and long associated with fruit gums and fruit pastilles. Randoms took that fruit gum tradition and pushed it somewhere odder: instead of the usual flat discs, every piece was cast in one of dozens of unrelated everyday-object shapes.
111 shapes, six flavours, four textures
What actually sets Randoms apart from a standard tube of fruit gums is the sheer variety packed into one product:
- Shapes — 111 different moulds in total, including ice cream cones, snowflakes, pigs, roller-blades, saxophones, sports cars, musical notes, paint brushes, bicycles, bow ties, ping pong paddles, flowers, puzzle pieces, buses and palm trees
- Flavours — six natural fruit flavours: blackcurrant, cherry, strawberry, orange, lime and lemon
- Textures — four distinct textures across the range: regular jelly, foam-backed jelly, foamy sweet, and liquid-filled foam-backed jelly
That combination of shape, flavour and texture is what the marketing leaned on hardest, most campaigns claimed there were billions of possible combinations in a single bag, meaning no two people's tubes were ever really the same.
Not to be confused with Swizzels Randoms
There's a genuinely separate product that shares the name: Swizzels Randoms, a pick-and-mix style bag of sweets from Swizzels, a completely different manufacturer with its own long history in British pick'n'mix and fizzy sweets. The overlap in naming is essentially coincidental rather than a shared product line, two different companies landing on the same word to describe the same basic idea: a bag or tube where you genuinely don't know what you're going to get. If it's classic gums and jellies you're after rather than the novelty shapes, our retro sweets range has plenty of the originals Randoms grew out of.
Frequently asked questions
When did Rowntree's Randoms launch?
Rowntree's Randoms launched in the UK on 18 May 2009, produced by Nestlé under its historic Rowntree's brand.
How many shapes are in a tube of Rowntree's Randoms?
There are 111 different shapes in the Randoms range, everything from ice cream cones and snowflakes to saxophones, sports cars, bow ties and palm trees, which is where the name comes from since no two tubes contain quite the same mix.
Are Rowntree's Randoms the same as Swizzels Randoms?
No, they're two unrelated products from two different manufacturers. Rowntree's Randoms is Nestlé's tube of oddly-shaped fruit gum and foam sweets, while Swizzels Randoms is a separate pick-and-mix style bag of sweets made by Swizzels. Sharing a name is essentially a coincidence of two brands landing on the same joke.