A Scottish baker, a partner and a biscuit prize.

Christie is the name Canadians see on Arrowroot biscuits and Newtons, but it began as a single Toronto bakery. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in a 1990 entry by the historian Dean Beeby, William Mellis Christie was born in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland and emigrated to Canada in 1848. He worked first as a baker for William McConnell on Yonge Street and, around 1850, moved to a bakery at the north end of Yonge Street run by Alexander Mathers and Alexander Brown.

In 1853, the biography says, Christie and George Maver took over that business. After a difficult 1854, Christie had by 1856 bought out his partner, purchased the shop and hired three assistants. In 1858 he won first prize for the best collection of biscuits at an exhibition of the Agricultural Association, and in 1860 he went into partnership with his father-in-law, James McMullen, to concentrate on biscuits alone.

The name the company still carries dates from 1868, when Christie and his former employer Alexander Brown became partners as Christie, Brown and Company. English Wikipedia says steam-powered machinery was installed that year. The firm moved to the centre of Toronto in 1872 and, late in 1874, to a nearby site at Duke (now Adelaide) and Frederick streets, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says. In February 1878 Christie bought out Brown but kept the name, and he remained sole owner until his death in 1900.

The workforce tells the growth story. The biography counts 12 employees in 1870, about 120 by the mid-1880s and roughly 375 by 1900. English Wikipedia, drawing on the same biography and The Canadian Encyclopedia, says the firm had reached a dominant position in Canadian biscuit-making by 1890 and employed two-thirds of the country’s biscuit workers. In June 1899 Christie, Brown and Company became a joint-stock company. Outside the bakery, Christie founded the Industrial Exhibition Association in 1879, sat on the council of Toronto’s Board of Trade from 1883 and became a trustee of the University of Toronto in 1887.

New York investors, Nabisco and a name that stayed.

After William Christie’s death the business passed to his son, Robert Jaffray Christie. English Wikipedia says Robert sold the bakery in 1920 to investors from New York, and that the National Biscuit Company, better known as Nabisco, acquired it in 1928. English Wikipedia’s article on Nabisco records the 1928 purchase of Christie, Brown & Company of Toronto and adds the detail that shaped the brand for the century that followed: in Canada, Nabisco’s cookie and cracker products kept the Christie name rather than switching to Nabisco branding.

That decision is why a founder’s surname became a household brand. English Wikipedia’s biography of William Mellis Christie calls him the namesake of the Canadian Mr. Christie brand of cookies and biscuits, a description repeated in its entries on his Scottish home town of Huntly and on Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where he is buried. Its article on Mondelēz International describes Christie Brown and Company as consisting of brands such as Mr. Christie, Triscuit and Dad’s Cookies.

The biscuit most closely tied to the Christie name today is the Arrowroot. Mondelēz Canada’s Snackworks site, checked in October 2026, files Christie Arrowroot biscuits, including a large family-size box, and Christie Newtons fig bars under a “Christie Cookies” heading, described as “sweet, filled, and crunchy” varieties. Newtons is the Canadian face of the cookie Americans know as Fig Newtons.

The same site lists the wider Mondelēz range sold in Canada, from Ritz, Triscuit and Chips Ahoy! to long-running Canadian lines such as Premium Plus crackers, Fudgee-O sandwich cookies, Stoned Wheat Thins and Bits & Bites. The company describes Fudgee-O as made with real cocoa.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all food brands, and all of them are Canadian: President’s Choice, Clover Leaf, Maple Leaf, Lantic, Christie, Neilson and Old Dutch. Canadian food brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner store to a national supermarket chain.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or snack it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Nabisco to Mondelēz, and a bakery site turned neighbourhood.

The ownership above Christie changed several times after Nabisco. English Wikipedia says Philip Morris Companies acquired Nabisco in 2000 and merged it with Kraft Foods, and that when Kraft split its grocery and snack businesses, the snack side became Mondelēz International, the parent since 2012. Mondelēz Canada, which has its head office in Toronto, names Christie among its “household favourites” alongside Cadbury, Oreo and Maynards.

Mondelēz says its makers and bakers produce chocolate, cookies, crackers and candy at manufacturing sites in Ontario. Its Canadian sites include the Scarborough Bakery, which the company says is commonly known as “Dad’s Cookies” and was built in 1966, and the East York Bakery on Bermondsey Road, which it calls its largest bakery in Canada by volume and the home of its Peek Freans products.

Christie’s best-known Toronto bakery was a lakeshore landmark. English Wikipedia’s articles on the Queen Elizabeth Way and the Gardiner Expressway point to the Mr. Christie cookie factory in the Queensway–Humber Bay area, and its Nabisco article says Mondelēz closed the Toronto bakery in 2013. The land has since become a planning project. The City of Toronto began its Christie’s Planning Study in 2019 to set a long-term vision for the area, its Planning and Housing Committee considered the final plan on 5 May 2021, and the resulting official plan amendment and zoning by-law are now in effect. A planned Park Lawn GO station is to be integrated into the former Mr. Christie’s Bakery site, which is to be redeveloped as a mixed-use community, English Wikipedia says, citing blogTO in 2020.

For a design guide, Christie shows how a Victorian baker’s surname, kept on the box by an American owner from 1928, became a Canadian household brand in its own right. Compare Ritz, the Nabisco cracker Mondelēz also sells in Canada, and Laura Secord, another long-lived Toronto food name. For this guide we use a Toronto red, an arrowroot cream and a biscuit gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Christie’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.