Biggest-selling sweet/candy

With annual sales worth $1.8 billion in the US only (2007 figures, then £900 million), the world’s most popular sweet is the M&M. The candy-coated chocolate drops were introduced in 1941 by Americans Forrest Mars and R. Bruce Murrie, who named the product after themselves (Mars & Murrie). Forrest Mars claims he was inspired to create M&Ms during the Spanish Civil War after seeing soldiers eating chocolate drops covered in a hard sugar shell, but the candy coated chocolate drop has been around for a lot longer than the M&M. Smarties first appeared in the UK in 1937, four years before the M&M, but the true origins of the candy coated chocolate drop are thought to lie in eighteenth-century France.