Wine gums, but no wine
The best-known Maynards story is still the Wine Gums story. Maynards Wine Gums were introduced in 1909, and the idea is usually credited to Charles Gordon Maynard, son of Charles Riley Maynard. The family wrinkle is the good bit: Charles Riley was a strict teetotal Methodist and apparently needed persuading that these new sweets did not contain alcohol. They did not, and still do not. The wine part lives mostly in the names printed on the sweets, traditionally borrowing from drinks such as port, sherry, burgundy and claret. It is a wonderfully British compromise: all the vocabulary of a drinks cabinet, none of the drinks.
From London kitchen to proper sweet works
Before the name became attached to packets on newsagent shelves, Maynards began much smaller. Charles Riley Maynard and his brother Tom started making sweets in a kitchen in Stamford Hill, Hackney, in 1880, while Charles’s wife, Sarah Ann, sold their products through a neighbouring sweet shop. The company was formally formed in 1896, and by 1906 Maynards had opened a purpose-built factory on Vale Road in Harringay. That move matters because it turns the story from domestic enterprise into London confectionery industry, the sort of place where local families might have known someone who worked there, packed there, or at least claimed they knew which sweets were best fresh off the line.
The Maynards Bassetts name on the packet
The Harringay works grew into a major local employer, and Maynards also expanded into toffee making in the Ouseburn area of Newcastle upon Tyne. Later, the business story became more tangled, as British sweet history often does once accountants and mergers arrive with tidy folders. Maynards’ chain of 140 retail sweet shops was sold in 1985, and the company 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. The Maynards Bassetts name used today arrived later, in 2016, under Mondelez ownership. So the modern packet is not a simple family shop label, but it does carry the line of one of Britain’s most recognisable sugar confectionery names.
Why wine gums stuck around
Wine gums have lasted because they occupy a very particular place in British sweet life. They are respectable enough for a grandparent’s cupboard, colourful enough for a child to sort by preference, and chewy enough to slow down even the most determined handful. They also have that faintly formal naming habit, as if a sweet shaped like a little tablet and stamped with “PORT” has somehow dressed for dinner. Juicies may be a modern variation, but it still belongs to the same family of sweets people remember from corner shops, car journeys, cinema bags and the sort of household tin that was never quite as full as everyone pretended.
A small packet of home logic
For British shoppers in Canada, Maynards Bassetts Wine Gums Juicies are not just fruit gums in a bag. They are part of a whole grocery memory system: the paper shop on the way home from school, a bag passed round in the car, someone insisting black ones are best, someone else being plainly wrong. There is comfort in a sweet that has survived changes of factories, owners and packet names while still making perfect sense once opened. The Great British Shop keeps that sort of cupboard-level nostalgia within reach, which is useful, because explaining wine gums to the uninitiated can take longer than eating them.
