Rowntree of York in history

In 1827 Joseph Rowntree’s father set up a grocer’s shop in Pavement (now a Pizza Hut restaurant), where Joseph learnt his trade. Joseph's younger brother Henry, knowing that he would never inherit the grocery business, went to work as an apprentice to his cousins the Tuke family, who were dealing in tea, coffee and cocoa. Their business had been founded in 1725 as a grocer's shop on Walmgate by Mary Tuke, a young Quaker woman.

Mary Tuke and her family were Quakers, a religious group who favored the cocoa industry because it offered workers an alternative to strong drink. She met resistance from the Merchant Adventurers’ Company, whose rules determined that a license was required by them in order to trade, and she was deemed ineligible being neither widow nor daughter of a member of the company.

In 1862, Henry Isaac Rowntree acquired the cocoa side of his cousin’s business. At first the business struggled, and near bankruptcy when, in 1869, his elder brother Joseph was sent to assess its finances and rescue his business. Joseph then joined his younger brother, in his newly founded cocoa and chocolate business. His great asset was his sons; John Wilhelm entered the factory in 1885 and Seebohm in 1888. Trade had improved, business had expanded.

Henry died in 1883 and the business passed to his brother who, in time, expanded the business to the chocolate factory on Haxby Road. Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa was announced in 1887. This and the gum pastilles were responsible for the growth, between 1883 and 1894, of the number of employees from 200 to 894. Joseph transformed his brother’s cocoa and chocolate business into a major confectionery manufacturer and a household name.

Rowntree’s owned York’s first motor car, which they used to promote the brand by creating a giant can of Elect Cocoa and putting it on the car. The public would come from miles around to see the spectacle.

Rowntree later merged with Mackintosh, and later was taken over by Nestlé in 1988, but continues to operate as a brand. Many sweets and chocolate bars that are a much-loved part of British life are manufactured in the York factory, like Kit Kat, Aero, Milkybar and Yorkie.
Rowntree of York in history

J. S. Fry & Sons Ltd.

A patent for the manufacture of chocolate was first granted to Walter Churchman in 1729. In 1756 Joseph Fry, an apothecary in Small Street, began to sell chocolate. Joseph Fry, born in 1728, had settled in Bristol in about 1748 and was admitted a freeman in 1753. He started making chocolate around 1759.

His first business was in Small Street, but in 1763 soon after buying the Churchman business, he was in Wine Street.

Fry’s expansion to the purchase of the Churchman business, including the patent for the mechanical process of chocolate production, and then deciding to invest in larger premises as well as purchasing a Boulton & Watt water engine to further enhance his firm’s capabilities.

When Joseph Fry died in 1787, his widow, Anna, and their son Joseph Storrs Fry (b 1767) carried on the business under the name ‘Anna Fry and Son’.

Almost immediately, J. S. Fry began a programme of expansion and mechanisation in production, using these technical advances as a point of difference in his advertising claims.

After the death of his mother in 1803, Joseph Storrs Fry took a partner, a Mr. Hunt, but in 1822 his three sons came into partnership with their father and the firm became known as J.S. Fry and Sons, the name it has borne ever since.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, business expanded rapidly. Between 1860 and 1907, Fry's opened seven new factories in Bristol. At the time Fry's became a registered private company in 1896, there were nearly 4,500 employees.

Company merged with Cadbury's chocolate in 1919 and the company name changed to British Cocoa and Chocolate Company. In February 2010 Cadbury was purchased by Kraft.
J. S. Fry & Sons Ltd.