You sit there, devouring them all Christmas, and you didn't even think to ask, did you?
Entranced by a tin of Quality Street, as a child I felt like a pirate who had just laid his hands on a hoard of treasure as I scrabbled through its brightly wrapped contents to find my favourite. Resisting the siren call of The Purple One and The Green Triangle, I would dive for The Toffee Penny.
The soldier and the lady might have disappeared, casualties of a rebranding exercise in 2000 shortly after it was acquired by Nestlé, the tin given way to more sustainable packaging, and the size of a tub shrunk by 50% since 2009, but Quality Street remains one of Britain’s festive favourites. More than 480 tonnes of liquid chocolate and 350 tonnes of toffee are used every week to produce Quality Street sweets, around 12 million of which are made every day at the peak of the season.
Seeking an unique product which customers could buy on their Saturday afternoons off and which would last the week, Violet Mackintosh, who ran a pastry shop in Halifax with her husband, John, came up with a new sweet in 1890. Softer and chewier, it combined traditional brittle English butterscotch with the new-fangled soft caramel which had just been introduced from America. Marketed as Mackintosh’s Celebrated Toffee, it came in a variety of flavours and sold as a mixed bag. Each flavour had its own distinctive wrapper, pink for coconut, orange for egg and cream, green for mint, blue for malt, red for original toffee, and yellow for ‘Harrogate’.
Made by Violet in a brass pan over the kitchen fire, the toffee proved such a success that by 1892 the Mackintosh’s were wholesaling it to other confectioners in Halifax. Seeking to expand the business, John set about planning a marketing campaign with military precision, using newspaper advertisements and travelling salesmen. ‘Six years were taken up in establishing business in the north of England and the Midlands’, he later explained. ‘Our method was to work a county at a time and do it thoroughly. No town was missed, but each was worked methodically’.
By the time of his death on January 27, 1920, John had transformed a backstreet business into an international company. Curiously, though, they had no chocolate making capability, a gap filled in 1932 when Harold, John and Violet’s son, acquired A.J.Caley & Son of Norwich for £132,000 for the rebranded John Mackintosh & Sons. Famous for Marcho, a chocolate product given to soldiers in the First World War, and Milk Tray, Caley’s opened up new opportunities.
One of the first products to be launched was Mackintosh’s Chocolate Toffee De Luxe, the original toffee coated in milk chocolate. By 1935 Harold was planning to launch a new product, a selection of toffees, chocolate, and confectionary treats in a tin. A chip off his father’s block, he planned the process with a key eye for detail, sending explicit instructions and detailed drawings to the design team of his vision of how the sweets and tin should look. The aim was to create a ‘sensory feast’.
Instead of having each sweet separated in a box, thereby increasing packaging costs, Harold chose to have them loose in a tin, each piece individually wrapped in coloured paper, and just like Mackintosh’s Celebrated Toffee, a separate colour and shape for each flavour. The process to achieve this involved using the world’s first twist-wrapping machine.
The tin served several purposes. It ensured that the delicious and enticing aroma of chocolate burst out as soon as it was opened and was practical, easy to store, and kept the contents as fresh as possible. Its look, according to Harold, had to have ‘the hallmark of quality written all over it – a design that is distinctive – a bright clean design that is in itself inviting’. Finally, it could be used as a cake or biscuit tin, keeping the name of Mackintosh to the fore for months and years to come.
Kirriemuir’s most famous son, J M Barrie, is best known now for Peter Pan or The Boy who would not grow up (1904), but in the 1930s his play, Quality Street (1901) was just as familiar. Set in the Napoleonic era, it told the story of a respectable spinster, Miss Phoebe Throssel, who poses as her own flirtatious niece, Miss Livvy, to win the hand of a former suitor, Captain Valentine Brown, who had just returned from the war. Premiered at The Valentine Theatre in Toledo, Ohio on October 11, 1901, it transferred to London’s Vaudeville Theatre on September 17, 1902, where it was a huge hit, running for 459 performances. It enjoyed many revivals and tours, especially in the period leading up to the Second World War.
‘The flavour that made the biggest immediate impact, though, was the caramel swirl, so much so that it became a product in its own right, packaged in a tube, named Rolo, and launched in 1937′
Harold Mackintosh’s vision was that his new product should evoke a sense of nostalgia for the old days by deploying sentimental and romantic imagery. He also wanted to impress on both shopkeepers and the public that it was a quality product. The two ideas conjoined neatly in Barrie’s successful play, its title giving the sense of quality and its two leading protagonists providing the sentimental romanticism.
Launched in 1936 as Quality Street, the tin design featured two characters, Major Quality and Miss Sweetly, loosely based on Barrie’s Captain Brown and Miss Throssel. When the advertising campaign made its debut on the front page of the Daily Mail on May 2, 1936, their parts were played by Tony and Iris Coles, the children of the campaign’s manager, Sydney.
Quality Street went on to become a phenomenal success, partly due to the quality of the product, but also because Harold had cleverly found a way to bring the taste of chocolate to the masses. In the 1930s chocolate was still an exotic and expensive treat and had not supplanted toffee and boiled sweets as the go-to form of confectionery for many. By adding a small number of chocolate-based sweets with chocolate coated toffees and fruit creams, Mackintosh made Quality Street more affordable than a box of chocolates would have been while giving many their first taste of a proper chocolate.
There were 18 different flavours in the original tin, and over the years many have come and gone, the announcement of each year’s selection generating much comment and excitement. While the transience of the likes of Gooseberry Cream, Apricot Delight, and Fig Fancy might not have been mourned, the Green Triangle, one of the original flavours, is still enjoyed to this day. The flavour that made the biggest immediate impact, though, was the caramel swirl, so much so that it became a product in its own right, packaged in a tube, named Rolo, and launched in 1937.
In the Quality Street circles I move in, there is always a surfeit of fruit creams left at the bottom after the initial feeding frenzy has subsided. It is not just a consequence of taste, but an illustration of an uneven flavour distribution, as Stephen Hull demonstrated on November 29, 2020, when he revealed the results of his audit of an unopened box. He found that out of the 85 sweets there were just four each of purples, green triangles, and orange chocolate crunch, but eleven each of toffee pennies and orange cremes.
My secret is out. By going for the Toffee Pennies, I am playing the numbers game!
Martin Fone is a writer, blogger and journalist from Surrey. He answers questions that people ask and also questions that people don’t ask
