Life in Liverpool's lost factory which made tuck-shop favourites

From chocolate eclairs to Metal Mickey's Atomic Thunderbusters

Generations across Merseyside will remember one famous Liverpool factory that created tuck-shop favourites loved by generations. Taveners - and its forerunners - have a long history dating back to Victorian Liverpool.

First called Tavener-Rutledge, later shortened to Taveners, it was William Henry Tavener who branched out from pickles and sauces into producing boiled sweets at his shop in Scotland Road in 1889. By 1911, there was a Taveners factory at Edge Lane, where many members of the same family worked together.

From there, the brand became famous for inventing hard-boiled fruit sweets and chocolate eclairs in the 1930s. Certain generations will remember the brand also producing other family favourites like buttered brazils and treacle, as well as eventually making the world-famous Everton Mints.

Former purchasing manager Ken Bryan, from Knotty Ash, started working at Taveners in the 1960s after seeing a job advertised in the Liverpool ECHO. Now 89, Ken worked at the famous factory for around 40 years until he retired at the age of 65.

The grandad-of-two told the ECHO: "It had two levels and I remember when I joined, there were rings in the wall in the packing room area and they were where they used to tie the horses. The previous company, I'm not sure what they did.

"The factory used to have a huge opening door so wagons or horse-drawn carts could go in. We used to take wagons in and load them.

"We also had a factory in Liscard over on the Wirral, which made certain products. There were 400 people in our factory when I joined and they had 80 hand dippers and they used to toss a piece of chocolate into liquid toffee, hot toffee, and lay it out on a tray.

"It was marvellous and it produced a good product. But eventually, while I was there, we managed to develop a machine to do this and that took over, so we finished up with probably about four people, five people running this machine, whereas we had 80 dippers before, so it all changed."

Through the years, the factory became known for producing many different products and in its time, employed generation. Ken said: "It was very noisy - especially because of the tins.

"We made millions of tins and we bought them from a Liverpool company. We had probably one or two deliveries a day of these tins, but we exported to something like 40 countries.

"It was very friendly. We used to play squash with a number of the other management. At Christmas, we used to have a big party in the factory and they'd usually move the machines to one side.

And there were a lot of relationships - people married and a lot of the staff were related. They put people onto them and say just go down to Taveners, they've got jobs going."

Taveners was famous for creating chocolate eclairs, a sweet that was one of Ken's favourites. But the company made an array of sweets and through the years, Ken remembers the company asking members of the public to come forward and suggest names for new products.

Ken would also write questions and answers to feature on product wrappers. He said: "Chocolate eclairs were the big one - they were big. But lollipops, we made all sorts of different ones too.

"Metal Mickey's Atomic Thunderbusters, they weren't lollipops, they were just balls - very acidy. They went big time, we were running overtime just to make them.

"They had a staff shop that would sell the misshaped sweets in there and the staff were allowed to buy them at a good price. Later on, I'd left by then, they set up a shop in the car park and people could go in and buy the misshaped sweets."

Taveners has long had a presence in Liverpool, however, in 2024, its parent company Valeo Foods announced it would be closing the factory doors for good in February 2025. In March this year, the ECHO reported how bosses called an all-staff meeting at the Valeo Confectionery factory at Edge Lane on March 11, to announce their intention to close the Liverpool site within a year.

A spokesperson for Valeo Foods Group at the time told the ECHO the proposed closure of the factory was "in the face of significant market challenges, changing demand and consumer preferences, as well as growing cost pressures." Since November, the Museum of Liverpool has had a new display of photographs looking at the history of Taveners.

Capturing early beginnings to its years as one of the UK’s most successful confectionery makers, Sweet: The Taveners Story looks at the workers behind some of the company’s famous creations, including lollipops, caramels and fruit drops. Much of the display is thanks to Ken and the late Bill Tavener, who kept an archive of photos and documents from Taveners in the early 2000s.

Ken said: "We were taken over by several companies eventually. Bill Tavener was the son of Henry and I said to him, look, when the newcomers come in, they may bin all this stuff, all the records and everything, what do you think we should do?

"With my daughter working at the museum, to me, it made sense. We came down, the two of us, with all the records and photographs and what have you, and turned them over to the museum.

"They were delighted. It preserves them and keeps them safe."

The display highlights photos that capture the day-to-day running of the factory, as well as the not-so-normal days. On occasions when players from Liverpool Football Club visited, a Candy Queen beauty contest took place and even the visit of an oversized mouse to the factory by the name of Mickey.

Sharon Brown, curator at the Museum of Liverpool, previously said: "It's great to be able to share these images of life at the Taveners factory for the first time. The factory and its staff produced some of the most iconic sweets of the 1970s and 1980s, including Mojos and Traffic Light lollipops, that many of our visitors will have very fond memories of."

The museum has a collection of around 250 photographs of Taveners and their workforce. More images are available to view in a special online gallery on the National Museums Liverpool website.

The display aims to evoke childhood memories of favourite childhood sweets and to shed light on the much-loved factory behind them. Museum of Liverpool is also looking to hear the memories of former employees who worked at Taveners and to help identify their colleagues in the photographs.

Sweet: The Taveners Story runs until March 23, 2025, and is a display of 14 photographs in the Museum of Liverpool’s Skylight Gallery, taken from the National Museum Liverpool’s collection. For more information, click here.