Kisses your throat better (Halls Soothers Throat Tablets)

Member Name: Whizz11

Product:	Halls Soothers Throat Tablets
Date:	14/10/08 (230 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice taste, liquid centre

Disadvantages: No medicine

It's that time of year again, winter!! and to start it off I have a cold so this morning at the station I bought my favourite pack of cough sweet, Halls Soothers. Each packet was £0.65 but this was a station and I know you can get them cheaper in places like Boots etc.

Halls are quite an impressive company. According to their website they account for more than 50% of international cough drop sales and their Halls Soothers range is the UK's number 1 medicated confectionery product. Halls was actually started by two brothers, The Hall Brothers in 1893 and originally they produced soap and jams. They then moved into confectionery and in the 1930's invented the popular mentho-lyptus which is the basis of most of their cough drops now.

Halls Soothers are basically hard fruit sweets (boiled sweets) with a refreshing liquid centre. From the research I have done, these sweets seem to not be medicated. You can get various throat sweets such as Strepsils or Lockets that do have some medicine in them but I don't think Halls Soothers do, they are more just like a cough drop, intended to provide your throat with some moisture and soothe it when it is sore. There is no advice on the packet instructing you that you can only consume two packets a day for health reasons due to the medication so this is why I think they are not medicated.

Like I said, the sweets are hard on the outside and taste like an ordinary hard boiled sweet to me. They have quite a nice fruity flavour. Halls Soothers come in four different flavours, Blackcurrant, Peach & Raspberry, Cherry and Strawberry. I bought the Blackcurrant flavour this morning and it was very real tasting, almost like a blackcurrant itself and was very tasty. This is probably because the sweets are made with real fruit juice so you are guaranteed to get a pretty realistic tasting product. In fact I have tasted all the flavours and they are all as nice as each other. Like I also mentioned these sweets have a liquid centre and when you bite into them you get a lovely thick, almost syrupy liquid that comes out. This is quite sweet but not sickly sweet and probably amounts to a quarter of a teaspoon. I find this is the portion that really soothes my throat and is probably why I favour these throat sweets over other brand, because of the liquid centre. If you are the type of person that sucks a sweet all the way to the end until it is really small you will find that the liquid centre will dissolve fairly quickly but if you crunch the sweet and bite into in as soon as you put it in your mouth you will get a big glob of the liquid centre straight away.

The packaging for these sweets is quite distinctive. The colour of the pack depends upon the flavour you have bought, for example the blackcurrant flavour I bought this morning was in a purple pack, strawberry comes in a red pack, etc, etc.

Each pack weighs 45g and probably contains about 10 sweets. They are each individually wrapped in the packet. Now a whole pack of sweets contains 165 calories so if you do end up eating the whole pack (or two like I have done so far today but I have a cold so that's a good excuse) then I don't think this is too bad for calories and relates to a chocolate bar or something similar.

I would definitely recommend these sweets as they have kept my sore throat soothed all day, I don't think they have helped to make it disappear in any way but have definitely made it easier to get through the day.

Summary: Halls Soothers