How snacks changed the British way of life

Telegraph

18-03-2025

Remember a time when your only treat was an orange-wrapped Breakaway after school, and eating between meals signified the decline of civilisation? If so, you grew up before the golden (wonder) age of the snack.
The sad news is that your Breakaway was finally taken away in February 2024 when Nestle took the 'difficult decision' to discontinue the biscuit after 54 years. There is no shortage of new snacks to throw into your trolley, however. In the latest figures from YouGov, 34% of us eat one sweet treat a day, while 12% admit to consuming multiple every day.
That's a hell of a mountain of Twixes, KitKats and Dorito packets to be left scrunched up on the train seat opposite.
We Brits have always been a nation of snackers – but the first snack foods were actually boiled peas sold on the streets of Victorian England.
The origin of the word 'snack' is thought to come from the Middle Dutch word 'snacken', which meant 'to bite.' 'We started to use the term 300 years ago to mean a small piece of something, such as a 'snack of cake'', says Annie Gray, food historian and the author of The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street. 'In the late 19th century, we had the first 'snack bars', which sold oysters, cheese, baked potatoes or pies to passers-by. These were often cheap substitute meals.'
Back then – as it arguably has now – snacking had class connotations. 'People in the upper classes had four meals a day – breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner,' says Gray. 'But the poor didn't have time for this: in many cases they didn't have ovens or even kitchens, so workers would grab things on the go. These days, people who are on their feet all day, or who work shifts, have a similar need for convenience food.'
But whatever your net worth or occupation, we all occasionally have a hankering for a snack – be it a Greggs apple Danish, or a pistachio, lemon and rose cake from Gail's Bakery.
Why our favourite snacks are sweet
Modern day snacks have mutated significantly since the days of oysters and peas. The McVities chocolate digestive was born in 1899, 14 years after the Jacob's Cream Cracker. The late 1980s saw the advent of the Kettle Chip: these days, the shelves groan with protein bars and salted caramel chocolate.
According to 2025 research from Statista, our favourite snacks these days are sweet. Chocolate biscuits make up the largest sales category, with people consuming them at four to five times the rate of savoury biscuits or crackers. The faithful pack of crisps – first sold in pubs just before the First World War – isn't far behind. In 2022, consumers purchased 66 grams of crisps per person per week (the equivalent of two bags), a rise of 18 per cent from the previous five years.
The road to Snacksville began after World War II. 'We already had 'elevenses' and the tradition of stopping for tea and biscuits,' says Gray. 'But in the middle of the 20th century, snacking was rebranded as 'grazing' – which sounds better but actually turned out to be worse for our health.'
Pen Vogler is a food historian, and the author of S tuffed: A Political History of What We Eat and Why it Matters. 'There's nothing intrinsically wrong with snacking and it's perfectly possible to do this healthily on apples or nuts,' she says. 'The problem is that over the past hundred years or so, the ingredients in our snacks have become less good for us. After the war, our snacks became made from extruded (or high fructose) corn syrup,' says Vogler. 'They were cheap to make and incredibly full of sugar.'
It will come as no surprise to learn that the snack invasion started in America. 'From the 1950s onwards, this was driven by marketing people creating new, segmented audiences,' says Gray. 'So, for example, we suddenly had the teenager, the 'tired mum', and the parents of children who got their way through 'pester power'.'
Vogler agrees. 'Food advertising wasn't particularly new, but by the 1970s, we had a 'surround sound' of advertising,' she says. 'This coincided with the rise of affordable luxury, the 'little treat' which was often full of sugar, because sugar is cheap. And so, snacking was rebranded as socially acceptable.' (To illustrate, the basket of snack foods on the table in the photo accompanying this article came to £30 in total from Tesco.)
The advertising campaigns were legendary: from Flake adverts of girls in baths (below) and on gypsy caravans, to Toffos: 'a man's gotta chew, what a man's gotta chew'.
Somehow, Mars persuaded us their Milky Way was 'the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite.' Only Yorkie Bars were manly enough for lorry drivers, and in 2023, Gary Lineker celebrated 30 years selling Walkers Crisps by driving around Battersea Power Station as 'Father Crispmas' in a sleigh full of salt and vinegar.
'We also had the rise of snacking in the office, as colleagues rolled Maltesers to one another across the floor,' says Gray.
The rise of convenience snacking
With the rise of the supermarket, it became easier to load up on snacks to have 'for later'. 'From the 1960s onwards, you no longer had to queue in a shop and be served over a counter,' says Vogler. 'In the past, this had served as a useful break when people were buying snacks, it made them think harder about what they were eating. A child could go into a supermarket and load up on crisps and chocolate now.'
Midlifers may complain that Wagon Wheels have got smaller, and Curly Wurlies have been retracted, but the range of foods available has exploded and this shows no signs of slowing down. 'The supermarkets have to sell more food to grow their businesses, so we have to eat more food,' says Vogler. 'Products got bigger, and then we had multi-packs of crisps. And don't even get me started on the meal deal.' (The supermarket meal deal typically consists of pre-packaged sandwiches, crisps and sugary drinks.)
This is before we mention the explosion of vending machines, which first sold chewing gum on the streets of New York in the late 19th century. But in 1972, the first glass-fronted vending machine was invented: now these mobile confectioners spew out crisps and chocolate bars day and night, in our stations and hospitals and schools.
'Snacking is a fast fix, like the equivalent of a social media post,' says Gray. 'You just can't get away from snacks – even Weight Watchers has branded bars now. The newest thing in the past 10 to 20 years is evening snacking – caused by home-working and the erosion of the nine to five work-life. All this together is really leading to a public health problem.'
A 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal showed that snacks made up a fifth of all calories we eat at home – around 370 calories per day. And this figure doesn't include snacks consumed outside the home, so the true figure is likely to be closer to an extra 500 calories per day.
A round-the-clock obesity crisis
All the experts concur that round-the-clock snacking is leading to an obesity crisis. In 2022, 27 per cent of children between two and 15, were overweight or obese, compared with 19 per cent in 2004 and 12 per cent in 1995. In the early 1970s, only five per cent of children were obese.
The evidence suggests we underestimate the calorific content of our snacks. For example, in a 2022 study from think tank Nesta, 75 per cent of respondents underestimated the calories in a sausage roll, with an average guess of 228 calories. And 95 per cent of respondents underestimated the calories in half a sharing bag of tortilla chips. The average guess was 214 calories, less than half the true value of 447 calories.
And with this extra weight comes serious health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. 'The problem of the eternal snacking is that your body doesn't have a chance to recover,' says Vogler. 'Your insulin response is constantly triggered. Snacking may have short-term enjoyment but it can also lead to long-term illness.' The new science looking into ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is young, but it seems these are having a deleterious effect on our microbiome, or gut bacteria.
'There's also a school of thought that snacking leads to anxiety and mental health problems,' says Vogler. 'The emotion of guilt is part of the snacking market. 40 per cent of people say they feel 'guilty' when they have a pack of crisps or a bar of chocolate. Why is this a guilty pleasure? Pleasure shouldn't make you feel guilty.'
But this could all be about to change. According to a survey published in The Grocer magazine, 40 per cent of adults in the UK are now motivated to make healthier life choices and six in 10 consumers are actively trying to choose healthy snacks to hit their fitness goals.
'This is seen in the value of the healthier snacking market which has seen 15 per cent growth in the last 12 months, taking it to £148 million,' says The Grocer. The protein bar area is the fastest growing – up 31 per cent in the past 12 months.
'It's certainly true that the Zoe app discourse around snacking – where people track their blood sugar after eating – puts an emphasis on quality,' says Gray. 'There are encouraging signs that people are turning to satsumas, apples or nuts, rather than a muffin mid-morning.'
Experts believe that the solution lies in a change to the 'food environment' – offering consumers healthier choices when travelling, or an alternative to fish and chips or pies at a football match.
'It's also important to realise that anything that comes with a list of health claims on the packet is not healthy,' says Gray. 'The healthiest foods come without a list of ingredients: indeed, without a packet at all.'
And yet, there will be moments in all our lives where only a pack of Quavers or a HobNob (or two) will do. 'The manufacturers are entirely open about their intentions,' says Vogler. 'Look at the Pringles slogan: 'once you pop, you can't stop.' It's an acknowledgement that we will snack until we die. But at least they are hiding in plain sight.'