Entranced by a tin of Quality Street, as a child I felt like a pirate who had just laid his hands on a hoard of treasure as I scrabbled through its brightly wrapped contents to find my favourite. Resisting the siren call of The Purple One and The Green Triangle, I would dive for The Toffee Penny.

The soldier and the lady might have disappeared, casualties of a rebranding exercise in 2000 shortly after it was acquired by Nestlé, the tin given way to more sustainable packaging, and the size of a tub shrunk by 50% since 2009, but Quality Street remains one of Britain’s festive favourites. More than 480 tonnes of liquid Chocolate and 350 tonnes of toffee are used every week to produce Quality Street sweets, around twelve million of which are made every day at the peak of the season.

Seeking an unique product which customers could buy on their Saturday afternoons off and which would last the week, Violet Mackintosh, who ran a pastry shop in Halifax with her husband, John, came up with a new sweet in 1890. Softer and chewier, it combined traditional brittle English butterscotch with the new-fangled soft caramel which had just been introduced from America. Marketed as Mackintosh’s Celebrated Toffee, it came in a variety of flavours and sold as a mixed bag. Each flavour had its own distinctive wrapper, pink for coconut, orange for egg and cream, green for mint, blue for malt, red for original toffee, and yellow for “Harrogate”.

Made by Violet in a brass pan over the kitchen fire, the toffee proved such a success that by 1892 the Mackintosh’s were wholesaling it to other confectioners in Halifax. Seeking to expand the business, John set about planning a marketing campaign with military precision, using newspaper advertisements and travelling salesmen. “Six years were taken up in establishing business in the north of England and the Midlands”, he later explained. “Our method was to work a county at a time and do it thoroughly. No town was missed, but each was worked methodically”.

By the time of his death on January 27, 1920, John had transformed a backstreet business into an international company. Curiously, though, they had no chocolate making capability, a gap filled in 1932 when Harold, John and Violet’s son, acquired A.J.Caley & Son of Norwich for £132,000 for the rebranded John Mackintosh & Sons. Famous for Marcho, a chocolate product given to soldiers in the First World War, and Milk Tray, Caley’s opened up new opportunities.

One of the first products to be launched was Mackintosh’s Chocolate Toffee De Luxe, the original toffee coated in milk chocolate. By 1935 Harold was planning to launch a new product, a selection of toffees, chocolate, and confectionary treats in a tin. A chip off his father’s block, he planned the process with a key eye for detail, sending explicit instructions and detailed drawings to the design team of his vision of how the sweets and tin should look. The aim was to create a “sensory feast”.

Instead of having each sweet separated in a box, thereby increasing packaging costs, Harold chose to have them loose in a tin, each piece individually wrapped in coloured paper, and just like Mackintosh’s Celebrated Toffee, a separate colour and shape for each flavour. The process to achieve this involved using the world’s first twist-wrapping machine.

The tin served several purposes. It ensured that the delicious and enticing aroma of chocolate burst out as soon as it was opened and was practical, easy to store, and kept the contents as fresh as possible. Its look, according to Harold, had to have “the hallmark of quality written all over it – a design that is distinctive – a bright clean design that is in itself inviting”. Finally, it could be used as a cake or biscuit tin, keeping the name of Mackintosh to the fore for months and years to come.