Buchanan's: Scotland's Confectionery Clan Since 1856
Buchanan's: Scotland's Confectionery Clan Since 1856
In 1856, John Buchanan and his brothers Andrew and Alexander opened a confectionery business in Glasgow. They had been making and selling jam. The move into sweets was a natural extension. What was less natural — and considerably harder to predict — was that those same recipes would still be in production 170 years later, made in a factory on the banks of the River Clyde in Greenock by a company that acquired the brand under circumstances involving a Glasgow Corporation demolition order and a banker turned confectionery entrepreneur.Buchanan's is known as the Confectionery Clan. The name is earned rather than manufactured.
Glasgow, 1856
The confectionery firm of John Buchanan and Bros was established in Glasgow in 1856. By 1869, demand had grown enough to require a large new factory in Stewart Street, Cowcaddens — the industrial heart of Victorian Glasgow. The factory expanded steadily over the following decades. A tall chimney was added in 1905 at a cost of £300. New machinery increased productivity. Vast quantities of fruit and sugar were imported, and jam and confectionery were exported worldwide, including to the United States and the Far East. At its peak, the Cowcaddens factory employed over 1,000 people — a significant employer by any measure, and a landmark on the Glasgow skyline for generations. The business was also among the first in Scotland to employ female administrative staff.The Buchanan family ran the business through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. By the 1950s, employment had settled to around 450. The company had survived two world wars, the Depression, and the structural decline of Glasgow's manufacturing base. The factory that John Buchanan had built was still standing. The same recipes — Butter Toffee, Russian Caramels, Italian Creams — were still being made.
The Demolition Order
In the mid-1960s, Glasgow Corporation began the large-scale clearance of the Cowcaddens area as part of a broader urban redevelopment programme. The Buchanan's factory was acquired by the Corporation under a compulsory purchase order. The factory that had stood since 1869, where over a thousand Glaswegians had worked, where the famous chimney had dominated the skyline since 1905, was demolished in 1967.Production could not simply stop. Buchanan's had a brand, a range of established recipes, and customers who expected their Russian Caramels and Italian Creams to still be available. The question was where to make them. The answer arrived in 1976, when Golden Casket — a family confectionery business based in Greenock on the Firth of Clyde — was approached by Buchanan's to take over manufacturing. Golden Casket, run by Douglas Rae, had been building its manufacturing capacity steadily since 1959. The Buchanan's contract was substantial enough that Rae negotiated a full takeover of the Buchanan's brand rather than simply a manufacturing arrangement.
Douglas Rae and Golden Casket
Douglas Rae's story runs parallel to Buchanan's and is worth a brief account. A banker by training who left the profession in 1959 with £100 and a conviction that confectionery was a better business, Rae built Golden Casket from scratch over the following decades. By the mid-1970s, the Greenock factory had grown sufficiently to absorb the Buchanan's range entirely. In 1976, under what Rae described as a unique settlement agreement still in place today, Buchanan's became part of Golden Casket.The brand didn't stop there. In 1989, Golden Casket took over Drysdale and Gibb, another established Scottish confectionery business. In 1990, Rae's own recipe idea — a tiny, intensely fruit-flavoured chewy sweet — was launched under the name Millions. It became an immediate success and is now one of the most recognisable pocket-money confectionery brands in the UK. In 1995, Golden Casket acquired Caramel House Ltd of Merseyside, adding further confectionery lines to the Greenock operation. The company that now produces Buchanan's is also the company that produces Millions.
The Recipes That Survived
The defining characteristic of Buchanan's is continuity. The recipes that John Buchanan developed in Glasgow in the 1850s — Russian Caramels with their distinctive soft caramel and cream centre, Italian Creams with their melt-in-the-mouth consistency, Butter Toffee, Treacle Toffee, Vanilla Fudge — are being produced today at the Greenock factory using the same formulations. The brand has won the Food from Scotland Excellence Award and the European Award for Excellence specifically for the Italian Creams and Russian Caramels. More than 50 product lines are now produced under the Buchanan's name.Produced on the banks of the River Clyde, the packaging reflects the Scottish heritage explicitly. Where most confectionery brands build heritage through marketing, Buchanan's has simply continued making the same things in Scotland since Victoria was on the throne.
The Iron Brew Lines
Among the most distinctively Scottish products in the range are the Iron Brew Humbugs and Iron Brew Pastilles. Iron Brew — the spelling Buchanan's uses, distinct from the trademarked Irn-Bru — is a flavour specific to Scottish confectionery culture, derived from the distinctively sweet and slightly medicinal soft drink that has been Scotland's most popular carbonated beverage for well over a century. The humbug format delivers the flavour through a hard boiled sweet with the traditional striped appearance, while the pastille offers a softer chew.For retailers south of the border, this is a genuinely distinctive line. Scottish confectionery flavours are almost entirely absent from English wholesale ranges. A retailer stocking Iron Brew Humbugs is offering something that customers cannot find at the local supermarket or from the standard wholesale catalogue.
