Bonds of London Flying Saucers - 12g

The Brand Behind the Bag Has a Longer Story

The Bonds name on the modern packet traces back to a Bristol confectionery business with a somewhat tangled early history. In 1884, the founding Packer family took on a partner named H. J. Burrows, briefly becoming H. J. Packer and Co. Within a year the partnership had dissolved, the business changed hands, and eventually passed to a man named Caleb Bruce Cole for the sum of around nine hundred and fifty pounds. The company kept growing under new management, and by 1901 had moved into a purpose-built factory at Greenbank, Bristol. Between 1903 and 1912, sales at that factory reportedly grew by around 250 percent, driven in part by penny sweets aimed squarely at children. The logic has not really changed.

Where the Bonds Name Actually Came From

The Bonds of Bristol brand was created in 1908, when the company operating the Greenbank factory acquired a Glasgow chocolate manufacturer called Carsons and decided to launch a separate brand to sell luxury chocolate products from the Bristol site. So Bonds began as a rather upmarket proposition, which makes its current home in a bag of fizzy rice paper discs one of the more interesting journeys in British confectionery. The brand eventually passed through several owners, operating under various names including Famous Names and Elizabeth Shaw, before the Greenbank factory closed in 2006. The Bonds name continued, and today it sits on a wide range of classic British boiled sweets and bagged confectionery.

Bristol Chocolate Country

Bristol was serious chocolate territory in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. J. S. Fry and Sons, one of the largest chocolate makers in Britain at the time, loomed large over the city. The Packer business and the Bonds brand that grew from it operated in direct competition with Fry's for well over a century, which is a long time to be in the shadow of a giant and still be standing. By the early 1920s the parent company was reportedly Britain's fourth largest chocolate manufacturer, employing more than two thousand people. Flying Saucers are a long way from that particular ambition, but the thread connects.

What Flying Saucers Actually Are

They are sherbet in a rice paper shell, shaped vaguely like the spacecraft British children were promised in comics and never quite received. The rice paper dissolves, the sherbet fizzes, and the whole thing is over in about ten seconds. That is not a criticism. Some things are exactly as long as they need to be. They are the kind of sweet that ends up in a paper bag with cola bottles and foam shrimps, bought by the handful at a newsagent counter where nobody was counting.

The Ones You Remember from Somewhere

For British expats in Canada, Flying Saucers belong to a very specific category of food memory: the things that cost almost nothing at the time and have somehow become oddly important since. They were not anybody's favourite sweet in a considered way. They were just always there, in the pick and mix, in the party bag, rattling around a paper cone on the way home from school. That is a harder thing to replace than it sounds. The Great British Shop stocks them for exactly that reason.