Moir’s Chocolates: ‘We all know where the rainbow goes’

Activism and turmoil churned in the streets of Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1840s, struggling toward the political system of responsible government. If activists stopped to inhale, they would have noticed an appealing aroma coming from the local bakery. Bread! By the 1870s the scrumptious scent of Moir and Son chocolate was in the air. Developing confections into a national brand, Moirs Pot of Gold was a customer favourite. The company was sold in 1967. The Moir’s name became a note in Canadian history.

Moir’s Chocolates advertisement featuring chocolate-covered cherries, Canadian Home Journal, April 1922. Archive.org.

“The baking and confection industry in Halifax was composed of four separate elements: candy production, fancy or pastry baking, bread baking, and the manufacture of crackers, ship’s biscuit and pilot bread,” said Ian McKay in “Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionery Industry,” Labour/Le Travaille, Vol. 3, 1978.

Benjamin Moir took over the bakery

In 1830, Scottish-born Benjamin Moir established a successful bakery on Brunswick Street in Halifax. Churches, homes, and industry took hold in the north neighbourhood, rising up around barracks and military installations built in the mid- to late-1700s. When Benjamin Moir died in 1845, his son William Church Moir (b. Halifax 1822) took over the small but busy bakery.

The 23-year-old “transformed his father’s workshop into a factory and thus revolutionized a traditional Halifax trade,” said Ian McKay in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. “He benefitted from large bread contracts for the military garrison.” The young manufacturer initiated plans for a new larger plant constructed over the seven years between 1862 and 1869.

Marrying Maria Ward from Bedford, NS in February 1852, the couple later became parents to six children—four boys and two girls. Meanwhile, the factory was growing, too. Moir “built a five-story plant occupying Grafton, Argyle, and Duke Streets featuring a steam bakery, flour mill and retail store which originally operated under the name Moir and Co.,” according to “Moirs Limited Fonds” at MemoryNS, Nova Scotia Archives. The industrial revolution gave businesses new sources of power, and the steam engine found purposes in all kinds of industries, including the food business.

Importing modern bakery equipment

Importing machines from the United States and overseas, Moir installed modern baking equipment and he wrote that “’fitted up his large and extensive premises as a Steam Bakery, not only for Baking Hard Bread, Crackers &c., but also for mixing Dough for Soft Bread by machinery,” quoted McKay. Sales increased and Moir took on partner E.C. Twining in 1866, becoming Moir and Company. By 1871, the partnership dissolved.

Expanding with industrialization

An advocate for the benefits of industrialization, Moir diversified his business with investments at Bedford, NS, “encompassing flour and woodworking mills, paper-box manufacturing, extensive timber lands, and much real estate.” Eventually, the businessman built the company’s own power station as well.

Still standing, the Moir’s Limited Power House build in 1932 is a reminder of the once-thriving chocolate company, Bedford, Nova Scotia. The small building was added to the Canadian Register of Historic Places in 1989.

All was not good for the expanding facility. Working conditions at the factory were downright dangerous. Injuries, overwork, and use of child labourers were rife. The journeymen bakers went on strike in 1868 to end night shifts and raise wages. (At the same time, workers in other Halifax industries were struggling for better conditions in Nova Scotia as well, including shipwrights and caulkers.)

Labour strife in bakery and the province

Fighting back, Moir used “strike-breakers and tried to secure the use of British soldiers.” The Amalgamated Trades Union attempted to boycott the bakery, without success. When a nine-hour day was finally achieved in 1890, Moir fired the unionized employees and hired non-union workers. Business carried on as usual.

\With his son James William managing the prosperous bakery, the senior Moir invested in modern machinery, such as mixers for hard bread and crackers and a Stevens bread mixer and kneader for bread. “By 1876 Moir had “two Side Furnace Ovens of the largest capacity and one very large Reel Oven,” noted McKay. In 1891, the business name was changed to Moir, Son and Company.

Adding chocolate to the mix

Adding to his production roster, William Moir launched into another type of production in about 1873: confections and chocolate. By the end of the decade, candy sales were contributing a large portion of revenue.

Along with labour strife, damaging fires interrupted business, such as a blaze in 1891 that destroyed the building. The company survived, rebuilding a new plant. On July 5, 1896, William Church Moir died at Halifax; he was remembered as an innovative, energetic businessman. William Moir joined his brother at the firm that year.

At the time of his passing, Moir’s bakery “employed 265 workers, produced 11,280 loaves of bread every day and made more than 500 types of confectionery, which were sold on the national market.”. At the turn of the century, the plant had multiple ovens located on several floors “and each of his two reel ovens had a capacity of turning out two thousand town loaves.”

Unskilled workers–many were women–paid by piecework

The bakery and candy-making required more skilled labour, able to assess how the products were cooking and when it was just the right time to begin the next steps. James Moir and I.E. Covey oversaw the cooking of a particular chocolate coating called “XXX.” To Covey, the product name defined “’the hall mark of excellence of a dissimilar product,’” said Janis Thiessen in an excerpt of Snacks: A Canadian Food History (University of Manitoba Press 2017). Using unskilled workers for the non-cooking part of the confection operation, Moirs paid many by piecework.

Most of the factory workers were women. “Three out of five women working outside the home in Halifax in 1891 were Moirs workers.” Women didn’t make the candy but “’sorted, packed, wrapped, shined, weighed, or inspected the finished products.” They did get to hand-dip the chocolates, though, training for two years to get it just right.

Women workers packaging products in cellophane wrap, Moir’s Limited, ca 1955. Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Shifting away from baking, Moir’s management perfected their sweet offerings with caramels, jelly beans, French Creams, chocolate bars, and many more. In 1928, Moir’s announced the Pot of Gold brand of boxed chocolates. The soon-to-be-famous boxes featured a rainbow and young woman, with the faces changing sporadically throughout the next 35 years.

Moirs Pot of Gold an international success

Sold nationally and internationally, Moirs products were “known on three continents,” according to magazine ads. The firm frequently advertised its many varieties of delicious sweets in newspapers, journals, and magazines. Later, in enticed audiences with engaging television commercials.

At Christmas 1974, the chocolate box was graced by a young woman for the last time, “but the rainbow continued to be used, and was promoted in a television jingle: ‘We all know where the rainbow goes…. We are told it’s a pot of gold.’”

Struggles in the chocolate industry

Prices of Moir’s chocolate bars increased after WW2 from five cents each to eight cents. The last Moir, the founder’s great-grandson John C. MacKeen, retired from managing the company in 1956. The next year, the company employees unionized, signing a contract with both Teamsters Local 927 and Local 446 of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union. A new problem arose—a federal tax. The tax was a significant hit on revenue to candymakers across the Maritimes.

Sold to Standard Brands Limited in 1967, the Moirs Limited brand suffered from mergers and relocations. Twenty years later, Hershey bought Moirs, but the Canadian division shut down in 2007. The rainbow of the beloved Canadian company evaporated.

Pot of Gold chocolates are again available on the Canadian market, but the delicious pleasures are now made by Hershey in the United States.

This article first appeared in Kingston Whig-Standard on October 26, 2023. (C) Susanna McLeod

Sources: 

McKay, Ian, “Capital and Labour in the Halifax Baking and Confectionery Industry,” Labour/Le Travail journal, Vol. 3, 1978: 63-108./JStor. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/25139908?read-now=1&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

McKay, Ian, “Moir, William Church,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1990. Retrieved from http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/moir_william_church_12E.html

“Moirs Limited Fonds,” MemoryNS, Nova Scotia Archives. Retrieved from https://memoryns.ca/moirs-limited-fonds

Thiessen, Janis, “Excerpt on Moirs Chocolates from Jane Thiessen’s Snacks: A Canadian Food History,” The Acadiensis Blog, January 17, 2018. Retrieved from https://acadiensis.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/excerpt-on-moirs-chocolates-from-janis-thiessens-snacks-a-canadian-food-history/