Where do Love Hearts actually come from? The answer is, from the intriguingly named Powder Room on the fourth floor of a family run business, Swizzles, in Derbyshire in the east-midlands of England, that has been producing the sweets since the 1950s. It’s a room foggy with sherbet as white sugar is pounded to a fine powder then pour through to a tablet machine one floor below where eight tons of pressure is used to press and stamp the sweets with those all-important message.
More than seven million Love Hearts are made every day, stamped with 134 different messages from My Girl to It's Love to I'm Shy. Over the years, some outdated messages have been deleted – such as Far Out, Man from the 1960s – and some have been added – for its 60th birthday the company asked fans to suggest some and the winners included 'TOTES HILAR','SKYPE ME', 'TAKE A SELFIE', 'TWEET ME' and 'SWIPE RIGHT' Swizzles, one of the last large-scale confectionary businesses still going in the UK sees itself as quite a romantic place to work with, it says, one in four co-workers at the factory in a relationship.