5 expert strategies for stacking a pick and mix cup to get the most for your money
The nation is starting to open up again (yay!), meaning we will soon be able to enjoy all our favourite pastimes like hitting a strike at a bowling alley, beating a top score at mini-golf, or watching a new movie at the cinema with some delicious treats.
With the excitement of shops, pubs restaurants and entertainment being available again, it’s safe to say we’re set to be spending more money than we have been doing recently. But there are ways to make sure that you’re getting the best value for your money, especially when it comes to Pick and Mix.
The experts at Pick and Mix London have shared their top tips on how to strategically stack your pick and mix cup. It’s not all about the weight of anymore, it’s about how to maximise the space to get your money’s worth!
1. The Spiral
The Spiral method focuses on putting a bigger/heavier sweet in the middle of the cup, like sweet fudge or a few tasty Bon Bons, and then spiralling other sweets like Strawberry Cables or Fizzy Watermelon Cables tightly around it. This works as cables and laces are pretty tricky to stack in a cup because they’re so long and would otherwise take up a lot of space. So, spiralling them around other sweets neatly helps to make them compact rather than knotting up and allows you to squeeze more sweets in there too.
2. The Section and Squish
If you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty, or sticky we should say, then The Section and Squish strategy is the one for you! This strategy calls for some strength as you take a selection of your favourite sweets, put them into the cup and then squish them down with your fist as much as you can. Then, take another sweet group, add them on top and repeat the process. Obviously squishing the sweets down will create more room for you to fit more in. But, the important aspect here, is taking one particular group of sweets at a time. For example, Happy Cherries will squish together easily because they are made of the same formulation. Our top tip would be to make sure you put your softest sweets at the bottom as they’ll be easier to squish and create plenty more space to build up.
3. The Wall
Building a wall in your sweet cup is a solid strategy. The Wall consists of using a sturdy, but lengthy, sweet like a Fizzy Apple Cable to build the initial wall in the centre of the cup. Then you can pack out the sides with sweets of a similar format. For example, the left side could be all jelly sweets and the right side all hard-boiled sweets. Grouping them together this way means that they will squish together easily so you’ll be able to fit more in. The wall also gives you something to push the sweets against to make them more compact.
4. Light Heavy, Light Heavy
This is the only method where you will need to pay attention to the actual weight of your sweets. As the name suggests, first start building your cup with a sweet that is light in weight, Fried Eggs are a great example, then stack a heavier sweet like Liquorice Catherine Wheels on top and repeat the process, adding sweets that are progressively heavier as you move upwards. Distributing the weight carefully in this order will put pressure on what’s stacked at the bottom, helping to make the contents of the cup more compact and therefore creating more space.
5. All the Small Things
Simple but effective, the All the Small Things strategy is the perfect option for those who are a fan of chocolate raisins or just small sweets in general. Really it should come as no surprise that the smaller sweets you choose the more sweets you get in your cup overall! Dolly Mixture, Smarties, Jelly Beans are all fantastic sweets to choose from for this method, especially if you want a lot of variety in flavours and textures.
So, next time you’re at the cinema trying to decide which sweets to get, try out one of our methods above for the best results!
