Before Percy, there was the penny bazaar
The brand behind the packet has a much older and more market-stall sort of beginning. Michael Marks established his first penny bazaar stall at Kirkgate Market in Leeds in 1884, helped by a £5 loan from Leeds warehouse owner Isaac Jowitt Dewhirst. At that stall, Marks used the splendidly blunt slogan “Don’t Ask the Price, it’s a Penny”, which is about as Yorkshire-retail as a sentence can get. Thomas Spencer, born in Skipton in 1851, had worked as a bookkeeper for Dewhirst’s wholesale company in Leeds before joining Marks as a partner in 1894. The modern M&S packet sits a long way from a Victorian market stall, but the line is there if you squint past the branding and the very pink pig face.
Marks, Spencer, and the art of own-label confidence
Marks and Spencer built much of its reputation on selling goods under its own name rather than filling shelves with other people’s brands. Food began to be sold by the company from 1931, and for much of the twentieth century the St Michael name appeared across M&S goods. St Michael was introduced in 1927 and registered as a trademark in 1928, named after Michael Marks by his son Simon Marks. By 1950, almost all goods sold by Marks and Spencer used that name, and it remained familiar for decades. The St Michael brand was dropped in 2000 as part of a wider rebrand, with food halls becoming M&S Foodhall. Percy sits in that own-label tradition, though with more ears and hooves than most.
A modern sweet with old-fashioned staying power
Percy Pig is not an ancient sweetshop relic in the way humbugs or liquorice comfits might be. It is a 1990s creation, which makes it modern by British confectionery standards, though now old enough to have its own nostalgia. For many people, Percy belongs to school trips, train-station M&S stops, office snack drawers, and the peculiar British habit of going in for a sandwich and coming out with three extra things. The sweets are made under licence in Germany, according to published brand information, which is one of those slightly unromantic facts that proves food history is rarely as tidy as the packet suggests. British shoppers are quite capable of becoming deeply attached anyway.
Why Percy travels well
For British expats in Canada, Percy Pig has a particular sort of pull. It is not just “a sweet”; it is the sweet near the tills, the one added to a basket after lunch, the one someone’s mum posts in a parcel with tea bags and a note saying “saw these and thought of you”. It is also very recognisably M&S, which matters. Some brands remind people of corner shops or petrol stations, but M&S food has its own place in British life: railway concourses, high streets, lunchtime queues, and that tiny moment of feeling organised because you bought something in a smart-looking packet.
A little pink reminder
Percy Pig’s charm is that it does not need a grand founding myth. The grand history belongs to Marks, Spencer, Leeds markets, penny stalls, and the slow building of a British high-street institution. Percy’s own story is smaller and more recent, but no less sticky in the memory: a bag of fruity pig-shaped sweets from 1995 that somehow became part of the national snack cupboard. In Canada, that can be enough. A familiar face, a familiar packet, and a quiet nod from The Great British Shop to all the people who came in for one British thing and somehow remembered six more.
