The History of Skittles: How a British Candy Conquered the World

Skittles is, in almost every way, an American brand. The Super Bowl ads. The aggressive neon. The sheer cheerful loudness of it. And yet: Skittles was invented in Britain. Named after a British lawn game. Spent its first five years quietly selling across the UK before anyone thought to bring it to America.

This is either a great irony or a perfect origin story, depending on how you look at it.

From Lawn Game to Candy Bag

The candy appeared commercially in 1974. The name came from skittles, an old British pin game similar to bowling, a connection that has never been satisfactorily explained and that the company doesn’t seem particularly interested in clarifying.

Five years later, in 1979, Skittles crossed the Atlantic and hit American shelves. By 1982, the Wrigley Company had licensed production and distribution rights in North America, and the industrial-scale rainbow era began.

The Color That Started a War

The formula is simple: chewy center, candy shell, fruit flavor coded by color. Red is strawberry. Orange is orange. Yellow is lemon. And green — for decades, for most of the candy’s life — was lime.

In 2013, Mars switched green to green apple. The response was not measured. Online forums lit up. Long-form grievances were written. People talked about it as a loss in a way that felt slightly outsized but also completely understandable, because lime had been there for forty years. Green apple tasted fine. It was just wrong.

Lime returned in 2021. The candy’s most dramatic decade was behind it.

“Taste the Rainbow” Is Thirty Years Old and Still Isn’t Boring

The campaign launched in 1994 via DDB Chicago, and the slogan has run continuously ever since, which almost never happens in advertising. What’s kept it alive isn’t repetition, it’s the creative philosophy underneath it: pure, committed weirdness.

Skittles ads have featured a man growing a beard of Skittles he can’t control. A man whose touch turns everything, including people he loves, into Skittles, with increasingly bleak consequences.

A walrus. The tone has no equivalent in consumer goods. Nothing else sounds like it, looks like it, or is willing to go where it goes.

That consistency of strangeness is, counterintuitively, one of the most disciplined brand strategies in the business.

Mars Buys the Rainbow

In 2008, Mars, Inc. acquired the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company for roughly $23 billion. Skittles arrived in the deal along with Starburst and several other Wrigley properties.

Under Mars, the line expanded into the predictable directions. Tropical, Sour, Wild Berry, Darkside. All the while, the core product stayed essentially unchanged. When something works at the level Skittles works, you don’t get experimental with the base.

The Year They Gave the Rainbow Away

In 2015, for Pride Month, Skittles released a limited run of all-white packs — every candy the same color, flavor unaffected. The tagline: During Pride, only one rainbow matters.

It was a remarkable move for a brand that has exactly one visual asset. They gave up the thing that makes them them. And that restraint made the campaign far more powerful than any amount of Pride-branded rainbow design would have. It’s been repeated and expanded every year since, and it holds up because it started from a genuinely good idea rather than just a good intention.

Images © Mars Inc.