OOOOOH! Only five more days until the Big ‘H’ so we better start getting into the spirit (get it?) with this week’s Wrapper Wednesday: featuring Wigan’s most famous son, Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe’s was founded in 1898 by husband and wife team William and Ellen Santus. The company’s humble roots started on a modest market stall in the northern town of Wigan, selling fruit and Ellen’s own hand made mints and toffees.
Almost 125 years later (they will be celebrating this anniversary next year) and Uncle Joe’s most popular creation, the mint ball, is still made to the same recipe and in the same traditional method – cooked over gas fires in giant copper pans (I should know, I got to see them make mint balls last year on my factory tour)!
This is not a wrapper for a mint ball however…The autumnal flavours of caramel and apple have been infused into the company’s trademark hard candy confection ‘balls’ in order to create ‘caramelised toffee apples’ (which is what we call ‘candy apples’ or ‘carmel apples’ in the UK).
The company’s mascot Uncle Joe (a pure marketing creation) has been given a spooky make-over to celebrate the Halloween season, featuring fangs and an upturned collar – he always had the dapper top hat! The company’s patriotic colours of red, white and blue have been subdued by the strong Halloween decor of black and orange – with traditionally frightening images of bats, a graveyard and a haunted house…as well as some fireworks thrown in for Bonfire Night!
It incorporates all those classic fun images that we think of during these autumn months, and it’s great to see a company adapt their classic logo with the changing seasons.
The British Candy Connoisseur 