The Modern Packet Has a Complicated Surname
Maynards sold its portfolio of 140 retail sweet shops in 1985, and the company itself was acquired by Cadbury in 1988. After that, Maynards was brought together operationally with Bassett’s and Trebor in 1990, with manufacturing for the three brands consolidated in Sheffield in 1991. Cadbury was later acquired by what became Mondelez International in 2010, which is how Maynards came to sit in a much larger confectionery stable. That is the tidy version, at least. The less tidy, more useful version is that the name on today’s bag, Maynards Bassetts, reflects a merging of two old British sweet identities rather than a single straight line from one kitchen to this exact packet.
Maynards Before the Hyphen
The Maynards part of the name goes back to north-east London. Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom began making sweets in a kitchen in Stamford Hill, Hackney, in 1880. Charles’s wife, Sarah Ann, ran a nearby sweet shop, selling what they made to the local community. The company was formally incorporated in 1896, and by 1906 Maynards had opened a purpose-built factory on Vale Road in Harringay. Those are the sorts of details that matter because British sweets often came from very practical beginnings: families, shops, local customers, and enough demand to make the kitchen arrangement increasingly silly.
Wine Gums, Methodists, and the Family Mood
The Maynards name is especially tied to Wine Gums, introduced in 1909 after Charles Gordon Maynard proposed them. The story goes that his father, Charles Riley Maynard, a strict teetotal Methodist, needed convincing that the sweets contained no alcohol. It is a very British confectionery problem: inventing a sweet named after booze, then having to reassure your own father that it is morally safe. Sports Mix is not Wine Gums, and it would be wrong to borrow that origin story as if it belonged to this bag. Still, the family’s habit of making chewy, characterful sugar confectionery is the brand background from which modern Maynards gum sweets are understood.
What Bassett’s Adds to the Name
The Bassetts side of the modern Maynards Bassetts name brings in another familiar British sweet lineage, best known to many people through liquorice allsorts and the broader world of bagged gums and jellies. The two names were formally combined as Maynards Bassetts in 2016 under Mondelez. For shoppers, that means the packet carries a double-barrelled name that sounds a bit like a school register entry, but it also signals the coming together of two brands that had long occupied similar territory: sweets for sharing, arguing over, saving until later, and then not saving until later at all.
Why Sports Mix Still Feels So British
Sports Mix has the particular feel of a sweet made for rummaging. You do not simply eat it. You inspect the shapes, make private decisions about which one is best, and perhaps offer the less favoured ones to someone else with an air of generosity. It fits neatly into the same memory box as pick and mix counters, paper bags twisted at the top, grandparents’ cupboards, and the peculiar joy of finding a familiar packet in a parcel from home. For British expats in Canada, it is not really about sport. It is about recognising the bag, the chew, the colours, and the small domestic ceremony of opening sweets that taste like a Saturday errand.
A Quietly Familiar Ending
There is no need to make Sports Mix grander than it is. It is a bag of British chewy sweets with a slightly daft theme, a modern name shaped by old confectionery firms, and enough memory attached to it to make grown adults surprisingly firm in their opinions. That is often how British groceries work abroad: not dramatic, just oddly specific and suddenly important. If it reminds you of newsagents, car journeys, packed lunches or someone’s kitchen drawer back home, then it is doing its job. The Great British Shop is happy to leave it at that, which is probably for the best.
