Smarties: How the stocking staple got its name | Hacker News Reader

Smarties: How the stocking staple got its name

bbc.com

17 pointssohkamyung18 comments

Tl;dr: no one knows how they came up with the name. It used to be called other things before branding became a thing. Board minutes don’t detail where the name Smarties came from, just that it was decided.

The title is a misrepresentation of the article really, it should really be something like “Smarties: How the stocking staple came to be” since it’s more a chronicle of its origins, than an account of how it got its name. Still an interesting read though.

It was an interesting article. Did the title really bother you that much?

Kind of, yeah. I liked the article and found it interesting, even said as much, but given the title I expected to learn how the name came about and I didn’t. The article doesn’t do what it said on the tin, as it were, interesting as it may have been.

Yes, it bothered me. I only skimmed the article looking for how it got its name, but the article never answers the question. How frustrating...

The packaging change the article is referring to was when Smarties used to come in a carboard tube, with a plastic lid at one end.

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/ae76784029684feb8d06d507f47ff7ad/c...

As a child it was fun to eat the sweets, then replace the lid and crush the tube to make the lid travel quite surprising distances

You can still do that with a Pringles [0] can - the pitch of the "boomp" will be quite a bit lower since the can diameter is larger.

[0] Potato snack chip ("crisp" for our UK readers) formed into hyperbolic paraboloids, which stack neatly in a cardboard tube

These are the European Smarties, not the american kind[1] which are more of a flavored chalk than a chocolate covered by a candy shell.

1. http://caffeineplease.typepad.com/caffeine_please/images/200...

Both sweets are British originally.

Fizzers is the British name for the tablet sweets, and the original one. They were renamed Smarties when they were imported to the US, like how Harry Potter was renamed!

http://idsgn.org/posts/parallels-fizzers-rockets-smarties/

M&Ms are also just a copy of the existing chocolate Smarties.

And for fun, those things are called Rockets in Canada as we do have the chocolate Smarties.

Nah. Necco wafers [1] are flavored chalk. Smarties are chalk with a good dose of sugar... Their nice concave shape maximizes sugar-tongue contact.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necco_Wafers

In 2005, Nestlé axed its cylindrical tube, much beloved by collectors hoarding the lids imprinted with letters, aliens and football phrases, in favour of a hexagonal shape.

However, you can still buy the larger tubes (150g) which are still cylindrical. That size is now the one given to kids at Christmas.

Hmmm, Smarties in Australia used to come in a small rectangular box and you opened it at one of the ends.

I can't recall ever seeing Smarties in cylindrical tubes with plastic lids.

Feels like we missed out on some fun.

After M&Ms were introduced in the 80's, Smarties became less common. I remember thinking Smarties tasted better at the time, but now I feel Smarties have lower quality chocolate than M&Ms. Maybe it is just familiarity bias.

Are M&Ms called Smarties in Europe?

I don't know about other countries in Europe, but here in the UK, we have both Smarties and M&Ms (in fact, there is a massive M&Ms store in Leicester Square, London). Although they are similar, they are produced by different companies. Here's a page outlining some of the differences between the two sweets:

http://www.candyblog.net/blog/item/head_to_head_smarties_vs_...

No, these are by Nestle, M&Ms are by Mars.

The chocolate tastes different as well. (I like them better personally, but rarely get to Canada to restock.)

In America, “smarties” are the cheapest, most hated, begrudgingly eaten, chalky Halloween candy imaginable.

https://www.smarties.com

The only thing worse than these chalk smarties are the Necco valentines day conversation sweetheart candies, that are roughly the same degree of chalkiness, but compressed to diamond-hard, tooth breaking unchewability.

This article is about M&M’s which, I guess England... refers to as... smarties.

This article is NOT about M&Ms. While superficially similar, they are made by different companies. Smarties predate M&Ms by decades.

Yeah, and that’s incredible, gee, but in America we just do not have any other word for this variety of candy coated chocolate thing, but oh my god brand names, wow.

What next? Bitching someone out about trademark law because they referred to a photocopy as a xerox? Watch out!

So yeah, awesome downvotes. Good job.

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