Historicist: Butterfly With Chocolate Wings
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Historicist: Butterfly With Chocolate Wings

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For your perusal: a tasty sampler of stylishly illustrated ads for the Patterson Candy Company published in Toronto-based humour magazine Goblin throughout 1924 and 1925. Perhaps it was an attempt to appeal to the 1920s version of the collegiate hipster that prompted the maker of chocolate bars and gift boxes to switch from their previously wordy ads to this series of humourous scenes, high society figures, and seasonal motifs.

John Patterson and Robert Wilson launched the Boston Candy Company as a retail store on Yonge Street in 1888. Soon after Wilson’s retirement in 1891, Patterson bestowed his name on the company and expanded into manufacturing with a successive series of plants along Queen Street West. Among the company’s claims was the opening of Canada’s largest soda fountain on Yonge Street in 1911, which promised patrons “the most delightful cooling drinks you’ve ever tasted.” After Patterson’s death in 1921, his sons William and Christopher took full control of the company. They sold the business to Jenny Lind Candy Shops owner Ernest Robinson in 1947, who maintained the Patterson brand for at least another decade. At the time of Robinson’s purchase, it was noted that many of the employees had long tenures with the company, possibly due to benefits like a cafeteria, music during working working hours (not specified if it was live or piped in), paid holidays, and a generous health plan. Judging by the number of Patterson-sponsored athletic teams mentioned in the sports sections of local newspapers, and sizable donations given to the YMCA, it appears that the company was very interested in the physical health of their employees or wanted to prevent them from suffering the ill-effects of overindulgence on the production line.


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Patterson Candy plant on Queen Street West, now the Chocolate Company Lofts. Photo by Jamie Bradburn/Torontoist.


The most enduring legacy of Patterson Candy is the plant it built at the southwest corner of Queen Street West and Massey Street in 1912. After an expansion in 1928, the five-storey plant included a printing plant and paper box manufacturing equipment amid its 60,000 square feet of air-conditioned work space. Full O’ Cream and Wildfire bars may be long gone, but you can live sweetly in the old Patterson premises in its current incarnation as the Chocolate Company Lofts.
Additional material from the June 2, 1911 and August 16, 1947 editions of the Telegram.

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