Vintage candy tin Mackintosh's "Quality Street"

Vintage round candy tin Mackintosh's "Quality Street". 

• Manufacturing date: 1940 / 1959. 

Round candy tin with a deepened loose cover and images of a mayor and a lady dressed in pink for "Quality Street" (toffees and chocolate) by Mackintosh. 

This vintage candy is in a nice vintage condition with traces of use. 

• Height: 7,7 cm. 
• Diameter: 13 cm. 

In 1890 John Mackintosh and his wife opened a shop in Halifax, where they created a new kind of sweet by mixing hard toffee with runny caramel. These toffees were made from inexpensive local ingredients such as milk, sugar beet and eggs. They were so successful that in 1898 they expanded the operation to build the world’s first toffee factory. It burned down in 1909 so John bought an old carpet factory and converted it into a new facility. 

When John Mackintosh died his son Harold inherited the business and in 1936 he invented Quality Street. The name was inspired by a play of the same name by J. M. Barrie. The name was a play on "Quality Sweet". 

In the mid to late 1930s, Britain was still feeling the effects of the economic crash and Mackintosh realised that in times of economic hardship and war, people crave nostalgia. Quality Street chocolates were, therefore, packaged in brightly coloured tins featuring two characters wearing Regency era dress, known affectionately as Miss Sweetly and Major Quality.

'The Major' and 'Miss', two figures inspired by the play's principal characters, appeared on all Quality Street boxes and tins until 2000. The original models for the pair were Tony and Iris Coles, the children of Sydney Coles who designed the advertising campaign that first appeared on a front page newspaper advertisement in the Daily Mail on 2 May 1936.

The brand was acquired by Nestlé when they bought Rowntree Mackintosh in 1988.