A Maynards story, rather than a neat Murray Mints origin story
There is not enough supplied product-level evidence here to tell a tidy invention story for Murray Mints, so it is better not to pretend there is one. What we can say is that the modern packet sits inside the Maynards Bassetts family, and that family has a properly British confectionery backstory. Maynards began in Stamford Hill, Hackney, in 1880, when Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom started making sweets in a domestic kitchen. Charles’s wife, Sarah Ann Maynard, sold their sweets through an adjacent shop, which feels about right for British sweet history: someone boiling sugar, someone else dealing with the customers, and everyone pretending this was a sensible plan.
From London kitchen to proper sweet-making concern
The Maynard brothers formally incorporated the company in 1896, and by 1906 Maynards had opened a purpose-built factory on Vale Road in Harringay. The best-known Maynards product story is Wine Gums, introduced in 1909 after Charles Gordon Maynard persuaded his strict Methodist, teetotal father that the sweets did not contain alcohol. That detail matters because it shows the kind of world Maynards came from: earnest, practical, slightly anxious about moral interpretation, and still somehow very good at selling sweets with wine names printed on them. Murray Mints are not Wine Gums, of course, but they now share shelf space under the same broader confectionery umbrella.
The bigger Maynards Bassetts tangle
The Harringay factory grew to employ more than a thousand people locally, and Maynards also expanded into a toffee factory in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle upon Tyne. Later, the company’s 140 retail sweet shops were sold in 1985, and Maynards itself was acquired by Cadbury in 1988. After that, the Maynards name became increasingly tangled with other famous British sweet names. Following Cadbury’s acquisition, Maynards merged operationally with Bassetts and Trebor in 1990, with manufacturing of the three brands consolidated in Sheffield in 1991. That is why a packet today can carry the Maynards Bassetts name and still feel connected to several different strands of British sweet-making history.
Why the packet name looks the way it does
In 2016, Mondelez brought the Maynards and Bassetts names together as Maynards Bassetts, which is the modern brand identity shoppers now recognise on bags of classic British sweets. It is not a romantic little workshop name, but it does help explain the packet. British confectionery has always been a bit of a family tree with too many marriages, mergers and inherited surnames. Murray Mints sitting under Maynards Bassetts is part of that story: an old-fashioned sweet presented through a modern combined brand, with enough heritage behind the names to make the supermarket aisle feel faintly familiar.
A small, minty piece of home
For British shoppers in Canada, Murray Mints are not usually about grand history. They are about the sound of a sweet knocking against your teeth, the faintly creamy mint taste, and the memory of someone producing one from a coat pocket as if it were medicine. They belong with grandparents’ cupboards, corner shops, car journeys and the kind of family parcel where half the contents are sweets nobody asked for but everyone eats. Stocked in Halifax by The Great British Shop, they are a quiet reminder that some flavours travel better than expected, even when they arrive in a bag that refuses to be opened quietly.
