A British chew, a competition name and a Slough factory.

Starburst began in Britain under another name. English Wikipedia says Mars introduced the sweet in the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1959 as Opal Fruits, a name chosen by Peter Phillips, then known as Peter Pfeffer, who won a competition to name it. Wikipedia says the chews were made at the Mars factory in Slough, Berkshire, and that the four original flavours were strawberry, lemon, orange and lime. The product is a small, box-shaped, fruit-flavoured soft chew, each piece wrapped on its own and sold in a stick-shaped pack.

In Britain the name came with a line. Wikipedia says that in the 1970s Opal Fruits were known in the UK for the advertising tag “Opal Fruits — made to make your mouth water”, part of a jingle that named the four flavours in turn. In an interview with The Guardian published on 1 July 2007, the motor-racing commentator Murray Walker, who had earlier worked in advertising, owned up to coining “Opal Fruits: made to make your mouth water”, alongside other lines he called “trite but successful phrases”.

The chew crossed the Atlantic in the late 1960s. Wikipedia says Opal Fruits were introduced in the United States in 1967 as M&M’s Fruit Chewies and were renamed Starburst by 1968, at the suggestion of the Mars food scientist Aaron L. Brody. Brody told his own story to UGA Online, the University of Georgia’s online-learning office, which published it on 8 December 2014. He said he was on the product development team at M&M’s Candies, which had to develop, produce and package a new candy every month for a reserved spot on displays in a group of test stores; candies that sold well went into regular production.

From M&M’s Fruit Chewies to one global name.

According to the UGA Online account, Brody’s team adapted a formula from its sister company in England, Opal Fruits, to make a chewy fruit-flavoured candy. The team named it Starburst and designed a package with pictures of a strawberry, lemon, lime and orange, because, Brody said, they thought it would make people feel they were tasting the real fruit. Neither the picture nor the name reached the shelf in that form. Fruit could not be shown on the package, Brody said, because there was no real fruit in the candy. Then, as the package was about to be printed, corporate called to say Mars wanted it named M&M’s Fruit Chewies, and the package was redesigned that day. The candy did well in its test spot and went out to the wider market. Brody said that because “M&M’s mean chocolate to everyone”, the sugar candy was moved back to the name that had not made it to print, Starburst.

Wikipedia says the American candy at first came in the same flavours as Opal Fruits, and that cherry replaced lime in the United States in the early 1980s. In Europe, it says, lemon and lime were combined into a single lemon-and-lime flavour to make room for blackcurrant. Over time the line grew to include Tropical, Sour, FaveREDs and other assortments.

The two names lived side by side for three decades. BBC News reported on 27 April 1998 that the last packets of Opal Fruits were disappearing from British shops, not because the sweets had been discontinued but because Mars had decided they should carry the same name in Britain as in the rest of the world: Starburst. The BBC placed the change alongside the earlier renaming of Marathon as Snickers, and quoted the Opal Fruits branding manager, Steve Reid, who said that international media no longer recognised national boundaries, so a product sold in more than one country should carry the same name in all of them. Wikipedia says the Opal Fruits name was phased out in the UK and then in Ireland in 1998, and that Mars has since brought it back for limited runs in Britain, including twelve weeks with the supermarket chain Asda from May 2008 and a bag sold through Poundland and Dealz from March 2020.

Mars has owned Starburst since its 1959 launch as Opal Fruits. Wikipedia says that after Mars acquired the Wrigley Company in October 2008, it moved its non-chocolate candy brands, Starburst among them, into the Wrigley subsidiary. The brand has also left some markets. 9News in Australia reported on 10 August 2022 that Mars Wrigley had confirmed Starburst was no longer imported into the country, where it had been brought in from Europe; a spokesperson said the company had decided to discontinue the brand in Australia from June 2022.

Design and documentation.

American candy usually reaches people as a wrapper or a box, and the pack is seen before the sweet inside is ever tasted. A sweet that sits on a cinema counter, a petrol-station rack or a supermarket checkout has only a moment to be picked out, so the pack has to carry the name, the flavour and a sense of the brand at a glance. Colour does much of that work, along with lettering that can be read from a distance and a shape that stays the same from one decade to the next.

Many of these names have changed hands over the years, passing between family firms, larger confectionery groups and food conglomerates, and production has sometimes moved far from the town where a candy began. The box or wrapper is often the part that stays recognisable through those changes.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — the founding story, the owners over time, where the candy is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A rename, a slogan and a little lad.

The Starburst story is, in large part, a story about names and pictures on a pack. The UGA Online account shows how much of the early identity was decided by what could not be printed: no fruit on a candy with no fruit in it, and no M&M’s name on a candy without chocolate. Wikipedia says the origin of the word Starburst is uncertain and that it was probably meant to express a burst of flavour at each bite and to catch attention at a time of interest in the space race. The British name had its own story, from a 1959 naming competition to a phase-out in 1998 and a string of limited revivals.

Advertising has followed the chew from market to market. Wikipedia gives the slogan as of August 2016 as “Unexplainably Juicy”. It says a 2007 commercial for the Berries and Creme flavour, known as “The Little Lad Dance”, showed a man in period costume singing and dancing about the flavour; Wikipedia adds that Advertising Age praised the spot, that the actor Jack Ferver described the shoot to Adweek, and that the commercial circulated again on TikTok in the second half of 2021. Wikipedia also lists Starburst-branded jelly beans, gum, candy canes and an energy drink made with C4 Energy, all carrying the same name and the same run of fruit colours.

For a design guide, Starburst shows how a candy can keep its form and flavours while its name changes to suit a global market, and how a colour code of cherry, lemon, orange and strawberry can carry a brand across several product formats. Compare it with Skittles, another Mars fruit candy, and M&M’s, whose name the chew carried for a short time in 1967. For this guide we use cherry red, lemon yellow, orange and strawberry pink with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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