The Morrisons name comes from Bradford, not a sauce laboratory
There is no supplied product-level origin story for Morrisons Tartare Sauce, so the honest heritage here is the story of the Morrisons name on the jar. In 1958, Morrisons opened a small city-centre shop in Bradford that is described as the first self-service store in the city, the first there to display prices on products, and it had three checkouts. In 1961, the first Morrisons supermarket, Victoria, opened in Bradford’s Girlington district in a converted cinema with free parking, which sounds both sensible and slightly glamorous in a very Yorkshire way. By 1967, Morrisons had become a public limited company listed on the London Stock Exchange, with more than 80,000 investors trying to buy shares. Not bad for a business that began with eggs and butter.
From Rawson Market to the supermarket shelf
The older Morrisons story starts in June 1899, when William Murdoch Morrison began as an egg and butter merchant at Rawson Market in Bradford. That market-stall beginning matters because Morrisons has long liked to present itself as a food retailer with one foot still in the market, even after it became a national supermarket chain. The later Market Street idea, with counters for butchers, fishmongers and bakers, nods back to that kind of shopping: less polished theatre, more “someone behind the counter probably knows what they are doing”. A jar of tartare sauce is not dramatic, but it fits neatly into that world of everyday British food bought for proper meals, quick teas and Friday fish.
The modern packet and the supermarket behind it
Morrisons grew for decades with a strong northern and Midlands base before the 2004 acquisition of Safeway gave it a much wider presence across southern England, Wales and Scotland. That helps explain why Morrisons own-label products feel familiar to different generations in slightly different ways. For some, the name means Bradford roots and northern supermarket habits. For others, it arrived through a converted local Safeway and became part of the weekly shop almost overnight. Corporate history likes to make such things sound tidy. In practice, British grocery memory is messier: one family remembers Market Street fish counters, another remembers a trolley dash after work, and someone else remembers being sent to get sauce because the chips were nearly done.
Why tartare sauce has earned its cupboard space
Tartare sauce is one of those condiments that rarely gets the glory but is badly missed when absent. It is there for battered cod, fishcakes, prawns, potato wedges, and the fish finger sandwich eaten over the sink because plates felt ambitious. Its appeal is partly texture, partly acidity, and partly the reassurance that someone remembered the sauce. In Britain, it often turns up without ceremony: a jar opened at the edge of the table, a squeeze bottle at a chippy, a little pot beside pub scampi. Morrisons Tartare Sauce carries that supermarket version of the same habit, the kind that belongs to cupboards rather than restaurant menus.
A small taste of the British weekly shop in Canada
For British shoppers in Canada, a Morrisons jar can do more than its label suggests. It brings back the strange comfort of ordinary supermarket choices: standing in the sauce aisle, comparing jars for no good reason, then buying the one you always buy anyway. Tartare sauce is especially good at this because it is tied to meals that feel stubbornly British, even when eaten thousands of miles from a rainy high street or a chippy queue. It may not be grand heritage, but it is recognisable heritage, which is often the more useful kind. The Great British Shop knows that sometimes the taste of home is simply fish fingers, chips and the right jar on the table.
