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Blue Bird toffee
A Midlands toffee maker with ideas about happy workplaces, a name borrowed from a stage play about happiness, and packaging now kept in a museum.
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Blue Bird Toffee was a toffee brand founded in 1898 by Harry Vincent at Hunnington, near Birmingham. It made toffee in the Midlands for a century, until the company left its site in 1998.
From Harvino to Blue Bird
Vincent first sold his toffee as Harvino, a name made from his own. He changed it after watching The Blue Bird, the play by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck, a fairy tale about the search for the blue bird of happiness. The new name stuck.
A good place to work
Like the Cadburys and the Frys, Vincent believed a workplace should be a pleasant place to be, and he built his business around that idea. It was part of a wider movement among British confectioners of the time who saw decent conditions for workers as part of good business. See the Cadbury family and the Quakers.
The tins
The company's historic packaging is now part of the collection of the Black Country Living Museum, donated by Ashbury Confectionery, the company that last owned the brand.
The end of Blue Bird
In October 1998 Blue Bird left its West Midlands site and moved to Hull, where it traded as part of Needler's. The combined company became Needler Bluebird. In 2002 it was bought by Ashbury Confectionery, which discontinued all the lines previously made by Needler's and Blue Bird.
What happened to the factory
In December 2021 permission was granted to demolish part of it and turn the rest of the Grade II listed building into flats, with housing on the rest of the site.
A lost taste
Blue Bird is one of many British toffees that now live on mainly in memories and museum collections. Some lost toffees do come back: Riley's Toffee Rolls were revived in 2008 from a family recipe. See Riley's Toffee Rolls, and for others that disappeared, sweets you can no longer buy.
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Questions and answers
Is Blue Bird toffee still made?
The original Blue Bird lines were discontinued after Ashbury Confectionery bought Needler Bluebird in 2002.
Why was it called Blue Bird?
Harry Vincent first called his toffee Harvino, then renamed it Blue Bird after watching Maurice Maeterlinck's play about the blue bird of happiness.
What happened to the Blue Bird toffee factory?
The company left its Midlands site in 1998. In 2021 permission was given to part demolish the site and turn the rest of its Grade II listed building into flats, with housing on the remainder.
Sources
- Blue Bird Toffee, Wikipedia
- Toffee, Wikipedia
Keep reading
- British heritage sweetsToffeeToffee is an English sweet made by boiling sugar or treacle with butter to the hard crack stage. What it is, where the word came from, and its British forms.
- British heritage sweetsOld fashioned toffeeA guide to Britain's old fashioned toffees, from slab toffee broken with a hammer to Everton, Harrogate, Walker's Nonsuch, Riley's, Sharps and Mackintosh's.
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- British heritage sweetsRileys toffee rollsRiley's Toffee Rolls were made in Halifax from 1907, dropped in the 1990s, and revived in 2008 when the recipe turned up in a family cookery book.
- British heritage sweetsOld fashioned sweets: the A to ZAn A to Z of old fashioned British sweets, from acid drops and aniseed balls to Wham bars and yellowman, with a line on each and a link to its full story.