The packet name is doing several jobs
There is no product-level origin story supplied here that lets us honestly say when this particular 130g bag began, who first mixed these exact pieces, or which factory first packed them in this form. So the honest story is not a neat invention about a single afternoon and a heroic sweet-maker with a scoop. What we can say is that the modern name, Maynards Bassetts, brings together two of Britain’s most recognisable sugar confectionery families: Maynards, long associated with gums and sweets, and Bassett’s, strongly associated with liquorice. The allsorts are the thing in your hand. The brand name is the family tree printed on the front, slightly tidied up for supermarket shelves.
From kitchen sweets to big British sweetmaking
Maynards grew from very small beginnings. Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom began making sweets in a kitchen in Stamford Hill, Hackney, in 1880, while Charles’s wife, Sarah Ann, sold their products through a nearby sweet shop to the local community. The company was formally formed in 1896, and by 1906 Maynards had opened a purpose-built factory on Vale Road in Harringay. That factory became a major local employer, growing to more than a thousand workers, and Maynards later expanded to a toffee factory in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle upon Tyne. It is a properly British confectionery arc: kitchen, shop counter, factory, and then enough paperwork to make the sweets look much less spontaneous than they probably felt.
How Maynards and Bassett’s ended up together
The modern packet makes more sense once the later business shuffling is put in plain English. Maynards once had a large chain of retail sweet shops, with 140 of them sold in 1985. The company itself was acquired by Cadbury in 1988. After that, Maynards was brought operationally together with Bassett’s and Trebor in 1990, and manufacturing for the three brands was consolidated in Sheffield in 1991. Cadbury later became part of Mondelez International, and in 2016 the Maynards and Bassett’s names were combined as Maynards Bassetts. Corporate history likes to make this sound tidy. In practice, it explains why a liquorice assortment can carry a Maynards Bassetts name while still feeling very much like part of the older British sweetshop world.
Liquorice, memory, and minor household disputes
Liquorice Allsorts sit in that strange category of sweets that people either miss fiercely or push politely to someone else. They are not background confectionery. They have opinions. For British shoppers in Canada, that is often the point. A bag like this brings back corner shops, grandparent cupboards, car journeys where someone opened sweets far too early, and Christmas bowls where the liquorice pieces slowly revealed everyone’s true character. The colours are cheerful, the liquorice is unmistakable, and the whole thing feels like Britain refusing to make sweets in a completely sensible shape.
Still recognisable, even far from home
For expats, Maynards Bassetts Liquorice Allsorts can be less about novelty and more about recognition. It is the sort of packet that looks normal to anyone raised around British sweets and faintly baffling to everyone else, which is not a bad summary of many British groceries. In Canada, that familiarity matters. It is not just sugar and liquorice in a 130g bag. It is a small, stripy reminder of newsagents, sweet tins, and the great national habit of having strong views about which piece is best. The Great British Shop keeps that sort of argument pleasantly alive.
