Joseph Terry and the York connection
In 1828, after earlier partners had departed, the business was renamed Joseph Terry and Company, with Terry becoming sole owner shortly afterwards. Terry had trained as an apothecary and chemist, which sounds very grand until you remember that nineteenth-century confectionery often sat surprisingly close to lozenges, gums and medicinal sweets. By 1840, Terry’s products were being sold in more than 75 towns and cities, including candied eringo, coltsfoot rock, gum balls and conversation lozenges. It was also part of York’s well-known confectionery trio, alongside Rowntree’s and Cravens, which is quite a lot of sugar for one city to carry with a straight face.
From lozenges to chocolate
The Terry’s story begins even earlier, in 1767, with a shop near Bootham Bar in York selling cough lozenges, candied fruit and other sweets. Joseph Terry joined the Berry family confectionery business in the 1820s, and his name eventually became the one that stuck. His son, Sir Joseph Terry Jnr, is often credited with pushing the firm into a larger industrial age, including the move to a factory at Clementhorpe beside the River Ouse in 1862. By the later nineteenth century, Terry’s had shifted firmly towards chocolate manufacture, which is the bit most modern shoppers understandably care about. Few people stand in front of a chocolate shelf yearning for candied eringo, though British nostalgia has managed stranger things.
The Chocolate Works era
In the 1920s, Frank and Noel Terry helped reshape the family business and commissioned the Art Deco factory on Bishopthorpe Road, known as Terry’s Chocolate Works. It opened in 1926 and became one of York’s most recognisable industrial buildings, complete with its distinctive clock tower. The best-known Terry’s product, the Chocolate Orange, was created there in 1932. That matters here because Terry's Milk Chocolate Mint borrows its modern sense of occasion from the same world of segmented chocolate: the tap, the unwrap, the little pieces that make sharing look mathematically possible. Different flavour, same sort of British chocolate ritual.
A brand with a complicated passport
Like many old British grocery names, Terry’s did not remain a tidy family concern forever. The Terry family sold the business to the Forte Group in 1963, and ownership later passed through several companies, including Colgate-Palmolive, United Biscuits and Kraft. Terry’s Chocolate Works in York closed in 2005, with production moved elsewhere in Europe. After the Kraft split, Terry’s became part of Mondelez International, then was sold in 2016 to Eurazeo, which formed Carambar and Co. A UK subsidiary, Terry’s Chocolate Co, was set up in 2019 to market the range in Britain. It is not the neatest family tree, but old confectionery brands rarely are. The packet may look simple, while the ownership history does a full lap round the business pages.
Why it still lands with British shoppers
For British expats in Canada, Terry’s is not just a logo. It is Christmas stockings, corner-shop shelves, supermarket seasonal aisles and the sort of chocolate that appears in a cupboard because someone’s mum thought it looked respectable. Mint chocolate has its own loyal following too, especially among people who believe orange has had quite enough attention, thank you. Terry's Milk Chocolate Mint gives that familiar segmented format a cool mint direction, so it feels recognisable without being quite the standard family script.
A quiet cupboard sort of memory
This is the kind of product that does not need a grand speech. It only needs someone to recognise the shape of the box, remember the tap, and decide that sharing can be discussed later. In Halifax or anywhere else in Canada, that small moment of recognition is often the point: a British chocolate name with York behind it, a mint flavour in the hand, and The Great British Shop quietly helping the cupboard feel a little more like home.
