Already in prehistoric times, people loved sweets. When they went looking for food they always took something sweet with them. People already knew then that something sweet was something tasty and something bitter was not.
The first real sweetener that people used to give their food a sweet taste was honey. Hunters in the Stone Age collected honey from wild bee nests. And the ancient Egyptians even had hives full of honey bees as early as 2500 years before Christ. Sugar as we have it today was also used very early. As early as 3000 BC, people in India knew how to extract sugar from sugar cane. Via the Arab countries, this technique later also became known in France and Spain. Image result for list of sweets from the past
Honey and cane sugar were already used to sweeten things, but we still have to wait a while for the first candy, which only came in the 16th century!! The idea of making all kinds of sweets from cane sugar originated around 1510 in the Southern Netherlands. The sugar was first heated and then a flavor was added. The German emperors had the sugar confectionery brought from the Southern Netherlands (now the Netherlands). They also had sugar figurines made for special events, and tada the first real candy! Too bad for ordinary citizens because candy was only for the really rich. Until 1747 when a German pharmacist discovered that you can get sugar much cheaper from sugar beets!! Candy then became more and more popular and now look how much candy there is!!