Category Archives: Confectionery

Confectionery, Spreads & sauces

Machinations: Batger & Co

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Batger & Co was the largest jam manufacturer in Britain by the 1870s, and became one of the largest employers in East London, with a workforce of 2,000 people.

Batger & Co was acquired by Needlers in 1970. Is last-surviving product, Chinese Figs, was discontinued around the turn of the 21st century.

Origins
The Batger (pronounced Batch-er) family had a background in the London sugar refining trade. The business claimed that it was established by a Miss Batger in 1748.

John Batger (1754 – 1825), a Quaker, had established a grocery business at 16 Bishopsgate Street, London by 1783. He was manufacturing confectionery by at least 1813.

Batger & Co had a four-storey factory at 15-16 Bishopsgate Street by 1847.

Samuel Hanson & Son acquire Batger & Co
Batger & Co was acquired by Samuel Hanson & Son, wholesale grocers of Botolph Lane in Eastcheap, in 1856. There were around twelve employees.

An annual, expenses-paid excursion for staff was introduced from 1856. About 25 people were employed by around 1860.

A new factory was established at 103 Broad Street, Ratcliff, London from 1863.

Frederick Machin enters the business
Frederick Machin (1826 – 1902) and Samuel Hanson (1804 – 1882) had control of Batger & Co by 1864. Machin was responsible for the subsequent growth of a relatively small and declining business.

The Bishopsgate premises were divested in 1867.

Batger & Co employed 200 people by 1871. “Harlequin” Christmas crackers began to be produced from 1872.

Batger & Co was described as the largest jam manufacturer in Britain in 1873.

The Batger & Co factory covered two acres, all built upon, by 1875. 450 people were employed; rising to 550 at Christmas and 700 during the English fruit season, when jam was made. Around 2,000 tons of sugar and 1,000 tons of English fruits were used each year. Machinery was used extensively.

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Frederick Machin had assumed full control of Batger & Co by 1880.

Batger & Co employed 400 people (250 men, 100 women and 50 boys) by 1881. The company was one of the largest manufacturers of jam and confectionery in London.

Batger & Co employed a workforce of 500 to 600 people during peak periods by 1887.

Batger & Co was one of the largest confectionery manufacturers in Britain by the turn of the 20th century. Nearly 1,000 workers were employed. Batger & Co was credited as the longest-established confectionery business in Britain.

Frederick Machin died in 1902 with a net personalty valued at £48,995. Control of the firm passed to his son, Stanley Machin (1861 – 1939).

Sir Stanley Machin (1861 – 1939) in 1932

Batger had introduced Chinese Figs by 1903. They were oval sweets consisting of real figs, fruit jelly and a sugar coating.

Christmas crackers were a major part of the Batger & Co business, and proved popular due to their high quality and low price.

A healthy export trade saw Batger & Co enjoy record sales in 1906, and the factory was extended.

Batger & Co was the largest ratepayer in East London by 1910.

Batger & Co employed a workforce of up to 2,000 people during peak periods by 1912. Joseph Hetherington (1873 – 1937) was manager of the confectionery factory by this time.

Batger & Co won a lucrative contract to supply the Army with jam during the First World War.

Chinese Figs were well-established as the most important confectionery line by 1920, with thousands of boxes sold during the festive period.

Batger & Co is acquired by Crosse & Blackwell
Batger & Co was acquired by Crosse & Blackwell for £522,902 in 1920. Batger retained its old management, and Stanley Machin was appointed a director of Crosse & Blackwell.

Batger & Co was the sole profitable Crosse & Blackwell subsidiary in 1923. However Crosse & Blackwell directors discovered that a confectionery business lacked synergies with a company largely concerned with preserves.

Machin and Hetherington family ownership
Crosse & Blackwell divested Batger & Co Ltd as a private company under the sole control of Stanley Machin and Joseph Hetherington in 1926.

Stanley Machin died in 1939. An obituary hailed him as one of the “leaders of commercial life in the City of London”.

Harold Stanley Machin (1891 – 1979) succeeded his father as managing director of Batger & Co.

The Broad Street factories were destroyed during the Blitz in 1940. A new factory was opened at 44 Southside, Clapham Common.

Batger & Co held a valuable contract to supply the J Sainsbury supermarket chain with own-label confectionery by the early 1960s.

Christmas cracker production is believed to have ended in around the late 1960s.

Sale to Needlers
Batger & Co was sold to Needlers Ltd of Hull, a rival confectionery manufacturer, for £263,000 in cash in 1970. John Hetherington and Colin Machin joined the Needlers board of directors.

The Batger factory in Clapham was sold for £330,000 in 1971, and production was relocated to Hull.

The last remaining Batger’s product, Chinese Figs, was discontinued around the year 2000. Its demise represented the end for one of the longest-established confectionery brands in Britain.

Confectionery

Life Saver: James Pascall

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James Pascall was one of the largest sugar confectionery manufacturers in Britain. The company claimed to have invented the individually-wrapped bon-bon. Pascall remains a leading sweets brand in Australia.

James Pascall establishes the business
James Pascall (1838 – 1918) was born in the south London town of Croydon. He was the son of a baker and confectioner of Huguenot descent.

James Pascall (1838 – 1918)

James Pascall worked as a salesman for Cadbury until 1866, when he established his own confectionery business in partnership with his brother Arthur Pascall. The two brothers had been taught how to make sweets by their father. The first premises was a small two room shop on Wells Street, off Oxford Street, London.

The business was to prove successful, and operations were relocated to a larger site at Valentine Place on Blackfriars Road from 1877.

Chocolate production was introduced from 1878.

The Blackfriars factory was largely rebuilt in 1895.

There were 300 employees, mostly women, by 1897.

A simple-minded employee deliberately burned down the factory in 1897, causing £20,000 worth of damage, and leaving only the offices intact. Rival confectionery manufacturers offered Pascall the use of their factories as a stop-gap measure.

By the turn of the century, one of the company’s most successful lines was Golden Maltex, a malt extract confectionery product. In marketing, the company focused on the purity of its products.

James Pascall is established as a limited company
James Pascall became a private limited company, with a capital of £50,000, from 1898.

Over 600 people were employed by 1902, and over 25 percent of production was exported.

James Pascall enjoyed strong relations with its staff. The standard working day was eight hours, and never more than ten hours, even during the busiest periods.

Expanding sales saw a new factory established at Mitcham in Surrey in 1904. The site offered ample opportunity for future expansion.

James Pascall employed over 2,000 people in Britain by 1915.

James Pascall acquired the licence to manufacture Life Savers for the British market from 1916.

Sydney Pascall and Edward Cassleton Elliott
James Pascall died in 1918 and his son, Sydney Pascall (1877 – 1949), was appointed as managing director and chairman.

Sydney Pascall (1877 – 1949)

James Pascall had a capital of £650,000 by 1920.

James Pascall formed a joint venture with Cadbury-Fry in the Australian market, and a factory was established at Hobart, Tasmania at a cost of between £300,000 to £400,000 in 1921. Wilfred Gover Pascall (1878 – 1958), the son of James Pascall, was appointed managing director of the operation.

The Queen and Princess Mary visited the Mitcham factory in 1921. The Prince of Wales awarded the company his royal warrant in 1922.

Company advertising in 1930 claimed that James Pascall was the originator of the individually-wrapped bon-bon.

James Pascall began to struggle with profit losses and an immense overdraft, and Sydney Pascall resigned as managing director in 1930, and as chairman in 1932, although he remained as a company director.

Edward Cassleton Elliott (1881 – 1964) was appointed chairman in 1932. He was what we would now term a business-turnaround specialist. Elliott reduced capital to £433,000, and soon returned the company to profitability.

The Blackfriars factory was destroyed in the Blitz during the Second World War.

The Mitcham factory employed around 1,000 people in 1949.

James Pascall made a profit before tax of nearly £500,000 in 1957. In both 1957 and 1958 an impressive dividend of 55 percent was paid out. The company had just over £2 million in assets by 1959.

Acquisition by Beecham and merger with R S Murray
James Pascall was acquired by Beecham for £2.5 million in cash in 1959. Pascall directors agreed to the deal, citing the pressure of increasing competition in the confectionery industry.

Beecham merged Pascall with its R S Murray confectionery subsidiary, best known for Murraymints, to create perhaps the fourth largest confectionery company in Britain. The production of Murray lines was concentrated at Mitcham.

The Chocolate Eclair product (chewy toffee with a milk chocolate centre) was introduced in 1960.

Pascall-Murray is acquired by Cadbury
Beecham chairman Henry George Lazell (1903 – 1982) explained, “we set up confectionery development laboratories, transferred some good marketing men, authorized development expenditure and an increased sales force and substantial advertising, but all to little effect”. Pascall-Murray lacked sufficient scale to make considerable profit, and Beecham decided to concentrate on its pharmaceuticals, soft drinks and toiletries businesses. Pascall-Murray was sold to Cadbury for £1.75 million in 1964.

The Pascall Chocolate Eclair was rebranded as Cadbury’s from 1965, and the filling was changed to Dairy Milk chocolate.

Cadbury marketed Pascall-Murray confectionery through its Fry subsidiary, and sales were buoyant, with the Mitcham factory working at full capacity.

Cadbury announced the closure of the Mitcham factory, which employed around 1,200 people, in 1970. Cadbury cited increased capacity at its other factories and persistent problems in sourcing sufficient labour at Mitcham. Production was largely transferred to Bristol, as well as Bournville.

The leading Pascall products in 1974 included Eclairs, Murraymints, bon-bons, fruit pastilles and marshmallows. Many of its sweets were sold in shops direct from the jar.

Cadbury expanded its confectionery subsidiary in 1989 with the acquisition of Bassett of Sheffield, best known for Liquorice Allsorts, and Trebor of London, best known for its mints.

Cadbury branded all of its fruit sweets under the Pascall name, and was introducing new Pascall branded products into the late 1990s.

Cadbury divested its British sugar sweets subsidiary to Tangerine Confectionery for £52 million in 2008.

Pascall products, such as bon-bons, have since been rebranded under the Bassett’s name in the UK. Pascall remains a major brand in Australia and New Zealand, where the brand survives as the sugar confectionery arm of Cadbury for that region.

 

Confectionery

Which mint came first: Polo or Life Savers?

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Polo and Life Savers are ring-shaped mints. When two near identical products emerge in two separate markets, it can sometimes be a coincidence. Sometimes it’s just blatant imitation.

Life Savers
Clarence A Crane (1875 – 1931) was an American chocolate manufacturer. To offset low summer sales, he introduced the Life Saver mint in 1912. The ring-shape of the mint was initially created by mistake, but Crane liked its distinctiveness. The Life Savers name was chosen as the shape of the mint resembled life belts (life preservers in US English).

Life Savers were launched in the United Kingdom in 1916. James Pascall, confectionery manufacturers of London, held the licence to distribute the product. At a time when medical claims for products were unregulated, the mints were advertised as an aid to digestion.

US sales of Life Savers had reached $5 million a year by 1921, with distribution across 84,000 outlets.

wint_o_green_roll

Life Savers were manufactured in Britain from at least 1923. As well as the original peppermint, the confectionery was available in cinnamon, liquorice and clove flavours. Sales peaked in 1931, when 2.28 million packets were sold. However confectionery rationing and limited imports during the Second World War meant that sales were practically non-existent by 1947.

Polo
Rowntree of York believed that a ring-shaped mint had potential when combined with their manufacturing, advertising and distribution expertise and knowledge of the British market. They had developed the Polo in 1939, but rationing saw its introduction delayed until 1948. The Polo followed a wave of 1930s innovations at Rowntree that included Aero, Smarties and Kit Kat.

Rowntree management were aware of the similarity between the Polo and Life Savers, but as their rival had not taken any action to protect their rights to ring-shaped mints, Rowntree was free to introduce its own version. To prevent legal action they stated “Made by Rowntree’s” clearly on the packaging.

An advert for Polo mints

Life Savers struggled to compete with the domestic strength of Rowntree, and British sales of Live Savers ended in 1956.

Small scale imports of Life Savers resumed in 1984, for sale in US military bases in Britain. Life Savers were reintroduced to the UK, imported from South Africa, in 1996. The relaunch was to prove unsuccessful.

Confectionery

Viennetta: the first branded ice cream dessert

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A look into the background of Wall’s Viennetta.

Viennetta is produced at the Wall’s factory in Gloucester. Wall’s is owned by Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant. Unilever is the largest producer of ice cream in the world, and also manufactures the Magnum, Solero and Ben & Jerry’s brands.

Viennetta

Sales of Viennetta totalled £328 million worldwide in 2013, according to Euromonitor.

Viennetta is an ice cream imitation of the French millefeuille cake. Unilever saved money by adapting the product from a Belgian Cornetto recipe. The packaging was based on a German Christmas log manufactured by Langnese, another Unilever subsidiary. There are no imitations of Viennetta because the process by which it is produced is protected by patent.

Viennetta
A French millefeuille cake

Viennetta was introduced from 1982. It was originally sold only in the United Kingdom, and was a Christmas-only special. The launch was successful, and Viennetta was introduced as a year-round product from 1984. Such was its popularity that Unilever did not have to lobby supermarkets to stock the product, but instead the supermarkets lobbied them. Unilever was consequently able to achieve excellent margins on the product, which the supermarkets often sold as a loss-leader.

According to Professor Geoffrey Jones, Viennetta introduced the concept of the branded ice cream dessert. For the first time, ice cream was the main item of a dessert, and not just an accompaniment to something else on the bowl or plate.

Perhaps the product’s vaguely European-sounding name was considered sophisticated in the early 1980s. Viennetta’s star may be rising worldwide, but it has a reduced presence in its native UK. In 2014 value sales were far below what they were in 1990, not even accounting for inflation.

Confectionery

Cadbury Dairy Milk

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Cadbury Dairy Milk

Cadbury is the second highest selling confectionery brand in the world after Wrigley’s chewing gum. Similar to the Coca-Cola Company, much of Cadbury’s success has been driven by a single product, the Dairy Milk bar. When someone says Cadbury, you instantly think of Dairy Milk, it’s purple packaging, and the famous “glass of milk and a half” slogan.

The Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar was introduced in 1905. Developed by George Cadbury Jr, it was the first milk chocolate bar to be mass produced in the UK. By 1914, it was the highest selling Cadbury line. The economies of mass production combined with rising incomes meant that the working classes could afford chocolate for the first time.

However, other manufacturers such as Fry and Rowntree soon caught up with Cadbury’s mass production methods. So why were none of their own product lines as successful as Dairy Milk? There is first mover advantage, yet it took seventy years for a product to seriously challenge Dairy Milk in the UK market. The Rowntree Yorkie bar made inroads in the 1970s, but has since faded somewhat. The Mars Bar built market share throughout the 1970 and 80s, largely because it retailed for half the price of Dairy Milk, so it was hardly battling on equal terms.

Why has Dairy Milk been so successful? There are two consistent brand selling points: Quality/Healthfulness and Luxury.

The brand has always been advertised as affordable luxury. Purple has been the dominant colour in the packaging since 1920. When you see purple on the shelf of the supermarket, you can be almost certain that it’s a Cadbury product. Purple reinforces the brand image: purple is regal and elegant and represents luxury. By dressing their product in purple regalia, Cadbury are expressing their confidence in the quality of their product. The packaging implies “Fit for Kings”, without the arrogance of explicitly saying so.

There is also an implicit ego boost associated with consuming a product that is “fit for royalty”. “You are good enough to consume this regal product”. The brand is egalitarian, which ties into the egalitarian nature of the Quakers, of which the Cadbury family were members.

This ties in with the original context of the product, which was offering the once luxury product, only affordable for the few, to the masses.

The luxury connotations of Dairy Milk reinforce the notion of a chocolate bar as a form of self-treating. The idea of chocolate as a reward, which is a powerful one, as consuming chocolate triggers the release of endorphins into the brain, which are the body’s “reward mechanisms”.

Since 1928, the product has been represented by the famous slogan, “A glass and a half”. This refers to the amount of milk (426ml) that a half pound (227g) bar of Dairy Milk contains. The slogan represents quality: no other competitor claims to contain as much milk, and milk is a simple, pure, quality ingredient.

Milk also suggests a certain amount of healthfulness. Milk grows bones and is/was given to schoolchildren. Milk is also a natural product, which counteracts the natural suspicions the individual may have regarding processed food.

Meanwhile, the name “Dairy” conjures up wholesome, rural imagery. The countryside has healthy and natural connotations. Interestingly, the second most successful Cadbury product after Dairy Milk is the Creme Egg, which also uses the double “dairy” imagery.

Dairy Milk line extensions continue to reinforce this image. To the modern consumer, “Fruit and Nut” and “Whole Nut” sound more like health bars or healthy cereals than high calorie confections. Again, fruits and nuts are products with healthy and natural connotations that professionals are always recommending we eat more of.

This healthfulness connotations help to allay the individual’s principal reason for not buying chocolate: it’s not good for you as it has a high sugar and fat content.