A Storck story rather than a neat product-origin tale
There is not a widely sourced, tidy little origin story for this 125g box of Toffifee in the way there is for some older British bars, so the honest route is to look at the Storck family behind it. Storck says its 1 Pfennig Riesen came onto the market in 1934 and was, according to the company, the first branded candy in Germany. After the Second World War, the company built a new factory in Halle, Westphalia, which became its main production base. Then, from 1962 onwards, Storck launched a run of familiar names within roughly two decades, including nimm2, Merci, Campino, Werther’s Original and Toffifee, which appeared in 1973.
From Werther to the wider sweet cupboard
The Storck business began much earlier, in 1903, when August Storck opened the Werther candy factory in Werther, Westphalia. It was not a grand empire at the start, just a small operation with three employees supplying sweets to local retailers. The founder later changed his family name to Oberwelland, which is one of those details that makes confectionery history more awkward than the packet would ever admit. The Storck name stayed on the business, while the family name moved on, leaving future shoppers with a brand that sounds simpler than the paperwork behind it.
Why Westphalia matters here
Storck’s roots are in East Westphalia, in north-west Germany, and that regional background gives the brand a rather different feel from the British chocolate names many expats grew up with. This is not Cadbury from Birmingham or Rowntree’s from York. It is a German confectionery house that became very good at making sweets that travelled well beyond Germany. Werther’s Original carries the town of Werther in its name, while Toffifee belongs to the later period when Storck was building a broader range of recognisable brands. The result is not exactly British in origin, but it has certainly found its way into British cupboards often enough to feel familiar.
The modern packet and the British connection
Storck UK was established in 1988, and the company’s British presence came to include names such as Werther’s Original, Bendicks and Toffifee. Bendicks itself has a separate London story, founded in Kensington in 1930, but Toffifee sits in the Storck line rather than that British mint-chocolate branch. That distinction matters, because packets can make brand families look smoother than they really are. Toffifee is a Storck product from the company’s post-war expansion era, later sold into the British market alongside other Storck names that became fixtures in supermarkets, corner shops and the quiet emergency stash at the back of the cupboard.
Why people in Canada still look for it by name
For British shoppers in Canada, Toffifee has a slightly different sort of nostalgia from the big childhood chocolate bars. It might remind someone of a Christmas bowl, a relative’s sideboard, a supermarket offer that somehow ended up in every house, or a box opened with good intentions and finished with no witnesses. It is tidy, portioned, respectable-looking confectionery, which makes the speed at which it disappears all the more suspicious. For anyone rebuilding a familiar sweet shelf an ocean away, The Great British Shop offers a quiet nod to the old cupboard logic: if it has little compartments, it probably counts as sensible.
