The Princes story is really a tinned fish story
There is no neatly sourced product-origin tale for this exact sardine and tomato paste, so it is better not to pretend there is one. What we can say is that it sits very naturally inside the Princes world. By 1915, Simpson Roberts, the company behind the later Princes name, was the world's largest exporter of lobster, handling one third of the world's lobster trade. The partnership was incorporated as a limited company in 1919. The company first entered continental Europe in 1960 and changed its name to Princes Foods in 1962. In other words, long before many people knew the brand from supermarket shelves, the business was already deep in the trade of canned fish and preserved foods.
From Liverpool, with a can opener nearby
Princes traces its roots to Liverpool in 1880, when Briton William Muirhead Simpson and Canadian Frank Roberts formed a partnership that initially imported tinned lobster from Canada. That Canada connection is a pleasing little twist for British shoppers now finding the brand on this side of the Atlantic. Liverpool mattered because it was a port city, and preserved seafood was exactly the sort of trade that suited docks, ships, warehouses, and a public learning to trust useful food in tins. The Princes brand name itself appeared in 1900, after the earlier Simpson Roberts trading years.
The modern packet name and the wider family
Princes has passed through a few corporate hands, as grocery brands tend to do when left unattended for more than a century. It was acquired by J Bibby and Sons in 1964, later sold to the Buitoni group in 1973, then connected briefly to Nestlé before being sold to Mitsubishi Corporation in 1989. In 2024, Mitsubishi agreed to sell the business to Italian-based Newlat Food, with the deal completed that July. None of that changes what people usually care about in the cupboard: the Princes name on a familiar fish paste. Still, it explains why a brand with Victorian Liverpool roots can have such an international back office. Tinned food history is rarely tidy. It just looks tidy once it is printed on a label.
Why sardine and tomato paste still earns its space
Fish paste has a particular place in British food memory. It belongs to brown bread triangles, lunchboxes wrapped in a bit too much cling film, grandparents who could make tea appear from nowhere, and cupboards where there was always something useful if you looked behind the beans. Sardine and tomato paste is not trying to be fashionable. That is part of its charm. It is economical, direct, and very good at turning plain toast into lunch. For British expats in Canada, it can also be oddly specific: not just fish spread, but the exact sort of fish spread remembered from home.
A cupboard note for far from home
This is the sort of product people either understand immediately or need explaining to, and British people are not always at their most patient when explaining fish paste. Princes Sardine and Tomato Paste carries the wider heritage of a brand built around canned fish, ports, shipping, and the everyday usefulness of preserved food. It is small, familiar, and quietly capable, which is more than can be said for many things in life. For those building a British cupboard in Canada, The Great British Shop keeps that sort of memory within reach, tin and all.
